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Anthropologized Science

Jon Spayde's friend Bill Logan coined the term "anthropologizing" to talk about what happens when you begin to relate activities in your own culture to activities in other cultures, especially in order to mediate biases.

I speak of "anthropologized science" because so many people are at a point where they don't know what to do with science - whether to study it, blame it, ignore it, deconstruct it, promote it, etc. In our culture, science claims the highest truth: as many have observed, it's our "state religion", and this is why many people fear its political dimension.

To me, the disjunctions between activities and disciplines of our culture represent a corruption of human thought and action. I want to recapture the distinct activities of science as part of an overall style of living.

I have no faith that the use of scientific methods leads to the sort of truth or power that I need to be happy. Those methods are simply familiar to me. And, of course, they've shaped the physical environment we've all found ourselves in.
 		Anthropologizing



1987

This is an excerpt from my essay in the book "Pow-Wow '86". I continue to use this technique every time I encounter somebody's new theory!

However, for better or for worse, I don't think science is our "state religion" anymore. Scientists nowadays are too critical of our way of life, and they're mostly being ignored as we cling to our delusions of grandeur, chasing dreams of technology and wealth.

 While learning how to practice science, I've found myself attracted to people like Jack Alpert, who built elaborate personal structures of thought, not after long, focused study of a narrow discipline, but in the manner of a bricoleur or idiosyncratic handyman, who acquires both tools and materials as they come, guided not by professional dicta but by what might by called an esthetic sense of their "rightness" for the project of making sense out of one's experiences.

The "science" of people like this is easily anthropologized, because it exhibits many of the characteristics of what Levi-Strauss calls "savage thought" (a better translation into English would probably be "wild thought", because Levi-Strauss uses the analogy of wild versus cultivated species). From THE SAVAGE MIND:

"The exceptional features of this mind which we call savage...relate principally to the extensive nature of the ends it assigns itself. It claims at once to analyse and to synthesize, to go to its farthest limits in both directions, while at the same time remaining capable of mediating between the two poles."

Within modern society, Levi-Strauss finds this style of thinking most prevalent in the arts:

"...there are still zones in which savage thought, like savage species, is relatively protected. This is the case of art, to which our civilization accords the status of a national park..."