As I posted last week, the current issue of Contexts includes my essay on "Accuracy in Ethnography: Narratives, Documents, and Circumstances." The print issue of Contexts has now been published, and the contents are available on line, here, with no paywall until April 7 (and never paywalled here). Below are some of my main points (sorry about the weird indentations, which I cannot seem to fix):
The University of California's Prof. Michael Burawoy really, really does not like my essay, or anything else I've written on ethnography, as he explains in a response published in the same issue of Contexts, titled "Empiricism and Its Fallacies." Here is the gist:
Lubet writes as a lawyer. He argues that, while the legal process inoculates itself against falsehood through the adversarial process, ethnography’s truths are more vulnerable, hiding its evidence behind a veil of secrecy and anonymity and allegedly equating myth and hearsay with reality. Accordingly, Lubet would require ethnographers to rely on multiple sources of evidence, employing documents, fact-checkers, reliable witnesses, and experts. In addition, he calls on ethnographers to follow the example of other scientists and cross-examine each other’s “facts”. This is, indeed, the strategy he follows in contesting some of Goffman and others’ empirical claims. As Lubet puts ethnography on trial, he acts as a stereotypical trial lawyer, ferreting out random errors in monographs to discredit them. Thus, for example, he disputes Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer’s claim, in $2 a Day, that students from Mississippi don’t know an elevator when they see one. He goes to great length, consulting all manner of experts, to show this is implausible, irrespective of whether this affects the argument of the book. Because Lubet’s pickings along these lines are quite thin, he goes on to indict ethnographers for covering their tracks through anonymity, thereby making it difficult to fact-check their evidence. At no point, however, is there any serious discussion of the theory or argument of the research Lubet addresses; in this line of reasoning, facts come first, and theory follows. If any of the facts are false, ipso facto, the entire theory is false.
You can read Burawoy's full response here (no paywall until April 7) or here (any time).
Nearly every sentence in the above paragraph mischaracterizes my views, and Burawoy's full essay is even more tendentious. I have written a reply that will appear on the Contexts website some time in the next few weeks, and I will post it on the blog when it is available. In the meantime, please enjoy Burawoy's essay, which is overheated, to say the least.
And you think this blog is an appropriate place to address this?
Posted by: Anon | March 11, 2019 at 10:50 AM
And why wouldn't it be? At the top of the blog one reads that The Faculty Lounge encompasses "conversations about law, culture, and academia." If one has been following this blog for over ten years now, a post such as this comes as no surprise and is perfectly fitting (apart from and in addition to the obvious point that Professor Lubet is drawing in large measure on his knowledge of the law and its conceptions of and approaches to facts and evidence to critique some inexcusably sloppy epistemic and social scientific research practices in the field of ethnography).
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 11, 2019 at 11:14 AM
Thanks, Patrick.
Posted by: Steve L. | March 11, 2019 at 11:20 AM
Did Mike come to your talk at Cal?
Posted by: Steve Diamond | March 11, 2019 at 02:50 PM
He did not.
Posted by: Steve L. | March 11, 2019 at 03:11 PM
It’s not, of course, just that he does not like your work, it’s that the scientific method is a devastating challenge to the relativist ideology that dominates ethnography and many areas of the social sciences. The give away in his rejoinder is when he puts “facts” in scare quotes. Of course, Burawoy helped create the modern ethnographic approach with his own work on labor in industrial plants. He has a lot to lose.
Posted by: Steve Diamond | March 11, 2019 at 06:29 PM
The phrase “relativist ideology” lacks a clear or unambiguous referent or meaning here, if only because what “relativism” means varies widely (the term ideology is also notoriously vague or at least in need of a working or stipulative definition or proper qualification given its many meanings, but we can put that aside for now), thus we might say, “there is relativism and there is relativism.” With regard, say, to value judgments and rationality, absolute relativism is incoherent. In anthropology, “relativism” became a methodological principle when its practitioners were doing field work in “exotic,” non-Western countries quite different from the affluent nations of North America and Western Europe, as an understandable concern arose among those in the field that the fruits of their research and studies would be dismissed as catalogues of the irrational, “primitive,” immoral, what have you. In short, because the seemingly stark “fact” that they are not, so to speak, like us, we find presumptive or sufficient warrant for seeing these societies as not worth our time and attention except insofar as we might want to convert or colonize them. Another way to put this is that there is simply nothing to learn about or from them.
However, as Hilary Putnam explains in one of his several discussions of relativism, it turns out that what is assumed or presumed to be “irrational or repulsive or both” may in fact in fact, the anthropologist discovers, “promote welfare and social cohesion,” in other words, it has a raison d’être suited, or relative, to that time and place. In other words, we cannot presuppose or assume that all of our judgments as to what is right and wrong or rational, reasonable or irrational and unreasonable are infallible, they may be relative to circumstances or occasions, be those natural or social. Putnam rightly points out that some anthropologists drew a rather more crude and mistaken conclusion, namely, that “it’s all relative,” “meaning that there is no fact of the matter as to what is right or wrong at all.” The motivation behind such a conclusion is often innocent enough insofar as the desire may be to see other and different societies or cultures destroyed or colonized or exploited. But Putnam rightly points out, for example, “that there are better grounds for criticizing cultural imperialism than the denial of objective values.”
Putnam thus proffers for our consideration another species of relativism, John Dewey’s “objective relativism”: “Certain things are right—objectively right—in certain circumstances and wrong—objectively wrong—in others, and the culture and environment constitute relevant circumstances.” This is far different, notes Putnam, from seeing our values (say, freedom, rationality, love, compassion, truthfulness, happiness or eudaimonia, and so forth) as mere matters of taste and opinion, because, as a few of my former students were fond of saying, “It’s all relative.” More strongly if not vividly, “Objective relativism seems the _right_ doctrine for many moral cases; but not for cases where rights and duties are manifest and sharp and the choice seems to us between right and wrong, good and evil.” Different societies, both historically and sociologically, uphold different albeit sometimes overlapping clusters of virtues and vices, for example, but what is not relative is the notion of virtues and vices itself. Different societies have different conceptions of flourishing: there need not be only one kind of well-being and Western societies do not have a monopoly let alone patent on same, thus there are pluralistic conceptions, which is sometimes conflated or confused with a doctrine of relativism.
We can illustrate one kind of relativism that is troubling with a vulgar model on its cultural variation provided by the late social anthropologist Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah with the following propositions:
1. that cultures or societies may have their own distinctive systems of morality and social practices
2. that these systems are ‘right’ for those cultures or societies in terms of their own contexts and their own functional interrelations
3. that, therefore, it is a mistake to pass critical judgments of better or worse on a comparative basis between them, since each is acceptable in its own place
Arguably, the locus of the problem is the final proposition, for it contains, in the words of Tambiah, “a logical contradiction in that it makes a non-relativistic general claim about a relativist assertion: as [Bernard] Williams puts it, there is here an ‘unhappy attachment of a nonrelative morality of toleration or non-interference to a view of morality as relative …. The central confusion of relativism is to try to conjure out of the fact that societies have differing attitudes and values an a priori non-relative principle to determine their attitude of one society to another; this is impossible.’” Tambiah takes what strikes me as a wise, or at least humane stance, declaring that he considers himself “to be neither a relativist nor an anti-relativist in absolutist or blanket sense.” His reasons for this are eminently worth sharing: “It is possible to take a more complex position between these extremes, and strive towards comparisons and toward general judgments wherever they are appropriate and possible, and to leave other matters in an unsettled state until better information or superior frameworks make comparative evaluations possible.”
Of course far more might be said in the spirit of the above material, but permit me to close with a brief mention of a notion of relativism or relativity from an Indic philosophical tradition, Jainism. The Jain “doctrines of relativity,” which are both metaphysical and epistemological, namely, anekāntavāda (the claim that reality is complex, i.e., ‘not one-sided’ but ‘many-sided,’ and thus can be know from a variety of perspectives), nayavāda (the ‘doctrine of perspectives’ or partial standpoints), and syādvāda (the doctrine of conditioned predication, literally, the ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’ doctrine). The gist of these doctrines, which are philosophically sophisticated (as the philosopher B.K. Matilal made clear), is illustrated in the famous story of the “blind men and the elephant,” attributed to the Buddha. Suffice here to say that there is much to be gleaned from these doctrines by way of appreciating the possible truths available to us in relying on, in the first instance, on a relativist epistemic (some would say phenomenological) practice. Incidentally, this could be seen as compatible with the philosopher Michael P. Lynch’s recent argument on how truth is both “one and many,” in other words, while our concept of truth is univocal (there is a single property named by ‘truth’), the manifestation of truth is plural in form, for it is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs (‘there is more than one way to be true’). “In other words, truth is a single higher level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties.” A cognitive or epistemic or truth-functional pluralism (which may be conceptual, substantive, logical, metaphysical, axiological, practical …) is sometimes framed in relativistic language, but strong or absolute relativism rules out evaluative standards, judgments or rational preferences of one kind or another, while pluralism comports with the possibility of or need to “adjudge some alternatives as superior to others,” albeit for “good and sufficient reasons.”
The physicist and science writer John Ziman provides with a conclusion of sorts: “There are many varieties of ‘relativism,’ but the ‘stronger’ they become the nearer they get to the black hole of total skepticism, from whence no philosophical traveler returns.”
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 12, 2019 at 09:56 AM
erratum (last sentence): "provided us with a"
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 12, 2019 at 09:58 AM
One more mistake (there are other typos as well): "The motivation behind such a conclusion is often innocent enough insofar as the desire may be to see that other and different societies or cultures are not destroyed or colonized or exploited."
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 12, 2019 at 10:08 AM
My take away is that of course ethnography should attempt to understand a culture on its own terms, but if you don't take facts seriously, you slip into truthiness.
Prof. Burawoy's response seems to be that truthiness is just fine as long as it comports with preferred theory.
- I really miss the Colbert Report
Posted by: r | March 12, 2019 at 10:14 AM
That has to be the longest non sequitur ever posted on the web, Patrick, but thanks. In any case, I can assure you that Burawoy is well aware of what is meant by relativism in this instance. It’s an unfortunate evolution away from his socialist leanings early in his life and is a testament to the corrupting influence of the dominant academic culture.
Posted by: Steve Diamond | March 12, 2019 at 03:06 PM
Thanks Steve D. (I hope this reply is in a length more suitable to the age of smart phones and Twitter.) To make clear what does follow (or could have been readily inferred) from what I wrote, it simply is NOT the case that “the scientific method is a devastating challenge to the relativist ideology that dominates ethnography and many areas of the social sciences,” if only because (i) scientific methods (there is no such thing as _the_ scientific method) are perfectly compatible with different forms of (non-simpleminded) relativism, such as conceptual relativism (Putnam) and the relativism enshrined in the proposition that “some truths may be more dependent on the vagaries of context than others,” (Lynch) and (ii) it is not clear that any such beast christened “the relativist ideology” “dominates ethnography and many areas of the social sciences.” We would need at least another book or two chock full of the relevant evidence to justify such an extravagant claim. The primary purpose of my original comment was to show that there are different kinds of relativism, some (the crasser or more simple minded forms) are clearly untenable and/or ethically troubling, others are more plausible if not availing or indispensable.
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | March 12, 2019 at 06:33 PM
"Arguably, the locus of the problem is the final proposition, for it contains, in the words of Tambiah, “a logical contradiction in that it makes a non-relativistic general claim about a relativist assertion: as [Bernard] Williams puts it, there is here an ‘unhappy attachment of a nonrelative morality of toleration or non-interference to a view of morality as relative..."
I disagree. The locus of the problem is the non-relativistic claim made in the second proposition.
Posted by: Which morality makes it 'right'? | March 14, 2019 at 09:10 AM