Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE METHODOLOGIES

unmanageable,and ambiguous, however simple they may superficially seem; that the nature of social reality is thus fragmentary, with perfect knowledge an illusion and immaculate perception a myth; that, furthermore, the human mind is inconsistent and eclectic, biased and situated, and its understanding of the other is only rough-and-ready, piecemeal and makeshift; and that, finally, as one cannot see things both steadily and whole, one cannot achieve a total and unequivocal interpretation of experience, it is appropriate to see them steadily and incompletely, recognizing in individuals’ socio-cultural engagements not any grandiose plan but a casual disorder, a muddlingthrough, and representing this not in terms of closure or completion, ‘[n]ot rounding off but opening out’—then one need look no further than such modernist social-cum-literary commentators as E.M.Forster (1984 [1927]:149). Post-modernism is obviously a question of emphasis, but the old Nietzschean wisdom holds the key, that ‘irony is in fact of the essence’ (Bradbury 1966:130).

See also: Discourse, Home and Homelessness, Irony, Science

QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE

METHODOLOGIES

Opposition between the concepts of the qualitative and the quantitative in research methodology points up disagreements over the nature of anthropology as such: art or science? When considering the range of methods of gathering data which anthropologists employ—participant- observation, interviews, life-histories, genealogies, censuses, questionnaires, network analysis, archival transcription—and the difficulty of deciding whether each is ‘qualitative’ or ‘quantitative’, and to what extent, it becomes clear that the latter distinction is really one of overall orientation and intention.

At the heart of the division is a disagreement over the relationship between anthropological knowledge and the replication of information. For something to be true, does it have to be observably replicated or replicatable (quantitative); and does a sample of events of the same kind have to be taken into account so that the representativeness of the new information can be ascertained? Alternatively, can one accept something is true if observed only by one person on one occasion (qualitative), both the manner of observation and the nature of the thing observed precluding replication; indeed, can something be imagined to be true if it is unique, its own kind, and while implicated in other things is not them and not like them?

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Secondary oppositions then follow in the wake of this question of replication, and extend the division (cf. Filstead 1970; Johnson 1978). For instance: Is it proper to explain subjects from an independent, extraneous or etic standpoint (quantitative), or must explanation be emic, and in subjects’ own terms (qualitative)? Should the researcher begin with a directing hypothesis (quantitative), or with an open mind, cleared as far as possible of preconceptions concerning the nature of his research subjects (qualitative)? Should research identify variables and causal relations which, it is hoped, possess universal provenance (quantitative), or is it sufficient to disinter substantive concepts and theories which are known to be locally grounded (qualitative)? Should the researcher restrict himself to sensory observation and the control of reason (quantitative), or allow himself to empathize, introspect and intuit meanings and relations (qualitative)?

Anthropological science?

In part, the opposition between the qualitative and the quantitative is an anachronism: a throwback to nineteenth-century conceptions of science, and attempts by social science to ape the reputed certainty of its methods of measurement and so borrow from its legitimacy and status. With the advent of twentieth-century science—Einsteinian relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory—comes a new ethos, however: an appreciation of the contingency, situatedness and intrusiveness—alternatively, the creativeness—of the research process as such. Conveniently summed up by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, here is a realization that the observer is inevitably and inexorably a part of what he observes, so that what the researcher confronts is ‘reality’ as apprehended through his own particular prism of perception, and what he gathers as results are artefacts of the process of his observation (cf.Wiener 1949:191).The research process is an interactive one, and the researcher, the observer, is at one and the same time an interactant, a part of the field of events under observation. Any interpretation of the information accrued, therefore, must somehow come to terms with the fact that far from being ‘things-in-themselves’, true for all places and all times, data are epiphenomena of their means of acquisition and their framework of representation (cf. Bellah 1977:xi). If there is no ‘immaculate perception’, and there are ‘no facts, only interpretations’, as phrased by Nietzsche (1911), then research observations, interpretations and generalizations are not so readily distinguishable from beliefs, hypotheses and evaluations (cf. Popper 1965:36).

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If there is a growing recognition in the natural sciences that proofs are learnt and respected practices common to a paradigm, and truth ‘primarily a matter of fit: fit to what is referred to in one way or another, or to other renderings, or to modes and manners of organization’ (Goodman 1978:138), then anthropology has also come to accept that ‘ethnographic reality is actively constructed, not to say invented’ (Dumont 1978:66). To write an authentic anthropological text is less to represent an absolute reality than to fabricate a fit of a particular generic kind between two types of conventional activity (exchanging spoken words and arranging written words), and hence to write social reality. The truth of anthropological accounts, in Wagner’s celebrated formulation, is that anthropologists invent a culture for their informants: here is what they imagine to be a plausible explanation of what they understand them generally to have been doing (1977:500–1).

This conclusion remains controversial, and much anthropological debate continues to occur concerning the nature of research processes, of research results, and of the presenting and appreciating of information. What should anthropology represent itself as if not a ‘generalizing science’ (cf. Ingold 1997)? Is it more than ‘a collection of travellers’ tales’ (Louch 1966:160)?

For some, however, this ambiguity and uncertainty is all grist to the anthropological mill. Anthropology—‘the most humanistic of the social sciences, the most scientific of the humanities’—has never been comfortably placed within certain categories of disciplinary knowledge, and, indeed, has seen its project as the exploration, and the calling-into- question, of conventional and disciplinary divisions as such. Anthropology was ‘born omniform’, Geertz puts it (1983:21), and should refuse to be bound or restricted by the preconceptions of categorial knowledge. In seeking as complex an appreciation of experience as possible, an appreciation of the ambiguities concerning the nature of knowledge and truth should make anthropology ‘more like itself (cf. Rapport 1997e).

This was certainly Edmund Leach’s message in his last writings. Drawing inspiration from the eighteenth-century philosopher—scientist Giambattista Vico, Leach set great store by the facility of an anthropologist’s ‘artistic imagination’ (1982:53). For Vico, the human imagination was to be regarded as a primary tool in a ‘new science’ which sought to understand the real as opposed to the outwardly observable nature of a human engagement with its environment. Such real knowledge called for an entering into the minds of other people; so that one came to know not only that (Caesar was dead) or how (to ride a bike) but what it was like (to be poor, to be in love, to belong to a

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community) (cf. Berlin 1990:62). Moreover, it was in the nature of this imaginative knowing, or fantasia, that it was not analysable except in terms of itself, and it could not be identified except by examples.

Furthermore, for Leach, since ‘the only ego I know at first hand is my own’ (1989:138), anthropological research was to be conceived of as a subjective process whose ‘data’ represented ‘a kind of harmonic projection of the observer’s own personality’ (1984:22). Inevitably, each anthropologist saw something which no other would recognize. But this still made the results of anthropological research admissible as knowledge because the aim was not ‘objective truth’ but ‘insight’ into behaviour, one’s own as well as others’: a ‘quality of deep understanding’ equivalent to ‘fully understanding the nuances of a language [as opposed to] simply knowing the dictionary glosses of individual words’ (1982:52). This made anthropological writings ‘interesting in themselves’—full of meaning, intended and unintended—and not revelatory of ‘the external world’ so much as of the authors reactions and interactions with it (1984:22).

In this Leach comes close to the tenor of suggestions by physics nobel-laureate Igor Prigogine (1989). For Prigogine, an appreciation of the instability and creativity inherent in our world, the impossibility of absolute control or precise forecasting, and a clearer view of the place of human activity-within-the-world, now bring the projects of natural science and social science close to one another. In both, old notions of determinism, materialism and reductionism, of knowledge as omniscient and timeless, must give way to ‘a narrative element’ in the way we conceive of our knowledge, represent it, and act upon its implications. For, ‘[i]n effect, all human and social interaction and all literature is the expression of uncertainty about the future, and of a construction of the future’ (Prigogine 1989:389).

Anthropology as personal documentation

From qualitative versus quantitative methods of knowledge-acquisition, we have thus moved to issues of foregrounding the narrative nature of our human being-in-the-world, and coming to terms with knowledgeprocesses which are constructive and interpretational. For many, this self consciousness has changed radically the nature of the anthropological endeavour: given it a ‘literary turn’. As urged by Needham (1978:75–6), a ‘counsel of perfection’ might now see anthropologists reassessing their tasks, their standards and their ambitions, and contemplating what the discipline might become if it were to break free from its present academicism. Might not anthropology one day achieve something

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possessing the humane significance of metaphysics and art, Needham ponders, if ethnographic interpretations were written with the imaginative acuity, the empathetic penetration, and the literary artistry of a George Eliot, a Dostoevsky or a Woolf? Regarding method, great impetus has been given to treating culture and society and their representation as ‘personal documents’. As a generic category of writing which includes diaries, autobiographies, life histories and letters (cf. Allport 1942), personal documents have long had a respected place in certain, more humanistic, versions of anthropological practice. What is different now, perhaps, is a matter of emphasis and evaluation.There is an appreciation of the ‘personal document’ of society and culture not as a partial component, as a biased version, as an overdetermined manifestation, as false consciousness, or whatever, but as all there is. If truth is constructive and interpretational, and a matter of narrative, then the whys and wherefores of the writing of the personal document that is an anthropological account, concerning the personal documents of those who are the subjects of the research, is all-important.

Opinion is divided, to say the least, concerning what might be described as the collapse of objectivity as a tenet in natural science (à la Heisenberg and Prigogine) and its implications for anthropology. Some see the collapse as a challenge, others as a temporary aberration to be lamented and overcome. Sharing Needham’s vision, for instance, are Watson and Watson-Franke (1985:96–7, 133) for whom

[m]uch ethnographic research lacks a true feeling for human life as it is subjectively experienced by individuals.We know the richness and complexity of our own inner life, and when we compare this to the many tedious, dehumanizing accounts of life in other cultures…we may feel an acute sense of disinterest and even outright alienation…. All too often the real things seem to get lost in the obfuscation of the investigator playing God with his constructs…. To understand the individual in his human fullness we must therefore suspend total commitment to our scientific preconceptions and enter into a dialogue with the life history.

Hence, they would urge a greater appreciation in anthropology of the personal document as a means to restore to the individual actor (anthropological researcher and subject) a measure of his lost integrity, dignity and significance. For such personal documentation may be understood both as an act by which the individual constitutes his

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