Shifting the Anthropological Paradigm (written 2001)
Anthropology has identified a set of duties to accomplish as a discipline, however has remained unsuccessful in its pursuits thus far. The three goals of anthropology are to 1) understand other cultures, 2) Establish positive relationships and modes of interaction between other cultures and our own, and 3) Learn about the human species as a whole from the sum of its parts (Wilk 1991). These three goals, however, cannot be accomplished without the understanding of the insiders point of view, or emic perspective, as the main frame of reference in a study. Without emphasizing the emic perspective, we can only see what the limitations of our cultural beliefs allow us to. The majority of anthropologists unconsciously project assumptions by interpreting our cultural patterns as analogous to other cultures, and creating blind spots by not being able to see the other culture for what it really is and what it has to offer (Narby 1995). Although attempts have been made in the past by Boas, Krober, Radin, Geertz, and many others to enforce the anthropology laws of non-ethnocentric studies and maintaining cultural relativism, very few academically acknowledged anthropologists have been successful in doing so (McGee&Warms 1996). It is through the Western cultural paradigm that anthropologists conduct studies, supporting and reinforcing the Western cultural assumptions about our “superior” reality as a result of this frame of reference. To be able to accomplish the first goal of anthropology and understand the reality of other cultures, anthropology must respect other cultural forms of medicine and knowledge as a system to be studied under, rather than a system to be studied from. As Radin (Darnell 2001) can be quoted: “Native people are subjects and collaborators, not objects for study,” (144). The inability of anthropology to understand other cultures then reflects on the latter two responsibilities as well. Falling short of the second duty, anthropologists are promoting extremely detrimental dynamics for the cultures under study in their relation to the West by reinforcing our existing cultural paradigm in their ethnographic work. Anthropologists have yet to start reflecting on the problems and aspects of our own culture in terms of our international relations, as they become obvious when viewing ourselves from another cultural perspective. Furthermore, anthropologists have not even begun to understand the complexity and potential of the human species with our paradigm focusing on aspects of our culture that exist in other cultures. Ethnographic studies remain biased with the assumptions that our culture contains the highest form of knowledge and has mastered the extent of human potentials. Therefore, this section is designed to reiterate the history and objectives of American anthropology, study the origins of our cultural paradigm and how this paradigm operates today, examine the reasons for our cultural attachment to the Western paradigm, and ultimately devise a scientific methodology that can be utilized to learn more from the emic perspective, and ensure that other cultures are properly studied without a Western bias. This section will also illustrate how this methodology accomplishes the three goals of anthropology to a much greater degree by looking at human cultures objectively.
In the early twentieth century, Franz Boas, founded the laws of American anthropology in response to the culturally destructive portrayals produced in the earliest of anthropological history. In the Nineteenth century, cultural evolutionists, such as Tylor and Morgan, interpreted our culture as the most intelligently evolved and equated the “savages” with the “others” (McGee &Warms 1996). These portrayals allowed for our culture to act in response to others as “less than human” by manipulating, exploiting, and destroying them to benefit our own cultural interests. Boas was the first to introduce the concepts of cultural relativism and ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is defined as judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture rather than by the standards of that particular culture (Miller 1999). The point of ethnocentrism is that as humans we automatically assume that the other is like us, however the other has a completely way of thinking, living and understanding the world. Cultural relativism is the idea that each culture needs to be understood in terms of the values and beliefs of that culture and should not be judged on the basis of our cultural paradigm (Miller 1999). Darnell (2001) writes:
Boas suggested “relativity of what is considered social or asocial, normal or
abnormal,” indeed, patterns of unfamiliar cultures necessarily appeared abnormal,
even pathological, “when viewed from the standpoint of our civilization.” The task
of the anthropologist of course, was to invent the standpoint and translate the oddity
of other cultures into a comprehensible norms. (112)
Boas placed a great emphasis on the “natives point of view” rather than blindly observing and interpreting. Judgement from what our society and culture accepts as real or impossible is a product of our enculturation. When conducting a study, to place supremacy on the Western form of knowledge and practices over the beliefs and practices of the other cultures, without properly understanding them, is a crime of ethnocentrism. The methodology that operates from an etic perspective, or outsiders point of view, is ethnocentric by disregarding the teachings of other cultural systems and disrespecting other cultural intelligences on the basis of assumptions that ascribe lower values to these systems of knowledge.
Kroeber, influenced by Boas, looked into the implications of ethnocentric ethnographies and how this influenced our cultural interactions with others on the basis of the “superorganic” nature of cultures (Hollis&Lukes 1982). Therefore, the significance of looking at the history of the Western world as it has interacted, and continues to interact with other cultures, reflects on our failure in our anthropological responsibilities to establish positive relations through ethnographic work. Kroeber found that our cultural interactions have far-reaching effects on transforming other cultures. Kroeber introduces the idea of a culture as “superorganic,” or continually being influenced and changed by other cultures. Not only has colonization occurred all over the world, placing governmental and economic hierarchies over other cultures, but the Western world has greatly transformed and “Westernized” other cultures, forcing them to become replicas of our own. Cultural imperialism is defined as a dominant group that claims supremacy over other cultures and proceeds to change the situation in its own its interests, at the expense of other cultures (Miller 1999). The Western culture is the most imperialistic culture in the world, colonizing and enforcing both our beliefs and our lifestyle on other cultures. The Western culture has not only dominated the world, but it has also destroyed the integrity of the native health care systems and knowledge by impressing Western “values” as a “superior form of understanding”. Narby (1995) writes:
First, in order to recognize the true value of their knowledge, they must face the
loss history has inflicted on them. For the last 500 years, Western civilization has
been teaching indigenous people that they know nothing-to the point that some of them
have come to believe it. For them to appreciate the value of their own knowledge, they
must come to terms with having been misled. (152)
Due to the powerful imperialistic nature of our culture, we continue to dominate traditional beliefs and practices with our interactions, and refuse to take responsibility for ourselves by changing our ways.
In Ghana, where I spent four months doing a field study, the oppressive nature of the Westerner interaction was continually impressing our paradigm of cultural supremacy, both rejecting and destroying the traditional integrity. Lewin (1940) writes:
Asante government who had continually viewed the European schools as agents
of “creeping imperialism,” believed that the spread of literacy to the Asante populace
would be accompanied by the introduction of Christian values and sweeping social
changes (61)
In Ghana, missionary activity was, and still remains, the only means to economic access of Western goods. Missions/schools have socialized the country into Western based thinking, medicine, and government. Christianity enforced Western values and beliefs by strictly forbidding traditional healing practices and forcing people to abandon this way of life. My Ghanaian friend Mavis explains, “In Accra people rarely if ever go to a traditional healer for help. If a person goes they will never tell anybody
People will say that they don’t believe in the fetish priests and they say that because they are Christian. If you are a Christian and you are caught going to a traditional healer, you will no longer be allowed to go to church.” (Mavis 3/14/01: 223, 425) When I asked her if people are banned from the church after just one time of seeing a traditional healer, she replied, “No, not usually. The first time you are banned from communion. But the second time you will be banned from the church!”
It is our cultural assumption, shared by the majority of anthropologists, that our systems are superior to the traditional forms of knowledge and practice. Our capitalistic system is dependent on creating this underclass of other cultures by conforming them to the Western way of life through social controls of missionary activity.
The Westerner acts of cultural imperialism has unfortunately already conquered the Southern part of Ghana, establishing the major cities of Accra and Kumasi, eliminating the traditional healing practices from the Ghanaian way of life. Staccato (4/5/01) explains how the older generations in the major cities still prefer traditional healing over biomedicine, however the current generation is unfamiliar with the traditional health care due to their enculturation in the Westernized areas of Ghana. Staccato explains, “It is because they grew up with it and they remember. Now we don’t know much about it because we all grew up as Christians. We don’t usually need to go to the traditional healers” (52). The message is clear for Ghanaians. If they want money and a successful life in the Westernized world, they must abandon their old traditions and submit to the Western values. The vehicle to Western respect and success in the economic world is only through Christian education and the adoption of the Christian ideology. Staccato describes the Cape Coast area where they have chosen to assimilate the old tradition with the new, explaining: “people say because of all the local spirits they are less developed economically.” (155) The Christian church still remains in Ghana a strong social control, impressing the Western paradigm as superior, benefiting Westerner capitalistic needs at the expense of the traditional culture.
Anthropologists, without proper acknowledgement of the traditional system, or recognizing it as a valuable and effective form of medicine, continue to contribute to Westerner cultural imperialism by reinforcing Western assumptions. It is our duty as anthropologists to bring awareness to our own ethnocentric and destructive cultural paradigm by acknowledging, respecting, and learning from the culture we are studying in. The only way we can learn more about our own culture is by taking into account the perspective of another culture. Ethically, anthropologists should not conduct studies on the traditional healing systems by marginalizing the aspects of culture they do not understand and not expressing the full extent to what they have to offer. This is the most common problem today in anthroplogical writing, bringing the impression to our culture that there is nothing worth perserving, learning, or of valuable contribution to the world that can be found in these traditional systems. In the acknowledgement of the many anthropologists who do recognize the value of traditional systems, these anthropologists are unfortunately excluded from the anthropological community in their “lack of professionalness” and remain unacknowledged as anthropologists due to their lack of energy to fight for the recognition they deserve. Frankly, no one who truly understands the traditional perspective cares to associate themselves with the “mainstream” in their state of anger and disgust, often creating a life for themselves solely as a traditional healing practitioner.
Anthropologists continue to serve our culture in self-interest at the expense of the traditional systems. The human brain, as understood by cognitive science, tends to fall into modes of “cognitive default,” or inability to logically understand when trying to sustain the matrix of beliefs that form a larger paradigm (Brodie 1996). It is a fact that by equally acknowledging other systems of health care and knowledge, our imperialist structure will fall without its reliance on a large body of support. Hollis and Lukes (1982), cognitively looking at the basis and reasoning for our cultural paradigm write:
Acceptance goes with local modes of cultural transmission, of socialization and social
control, of power and authority: the scientific task is to trace these links, investigating
the “specific local causes of beliefs being held,” (4)
In this same book, Elster proposes the modes of error for cognitive thinking as a result of maintaining the cultural paradigm as a mode of social survival. He writes:
There is no reason to suppose that beliefs shaped by a social position then to serve the
interests of the persons in that position
There is no reason to suppose that beliefs shaped
by a social position tend to serve the interest of the ruling or dominant group. Biases are
there to support the social ideology. (130)
The cultural pressure to maintain this paradigm of superiority has effected the ability of anthropology to drop their ethnocentric, self-interested judgements with unfounded assumptions. Narby (1995) writes:
Anthropologists discovered that their gaze was a tool of domination
and that their discipline was not only a child of colonialism, it also served the
colonial cause through its own practice. The “unbiased and supra-cultural language
of the observer” was actually a colonial discourse and form of domination.
The solutions for the discipline consisted in accepting that it was not a science,
but a form of interpretation. Claude Levi-Strauss himself came to say: “The human sciences
are only sciences by way of a self-flattering imposture. They run into an insurmountable
limit, because the realities they aspire to understand are of the same order of complexity
as the intellectual means they deploy. Therefore they are incapable of mastering their object,
and always will be. (14)
The question is are we correct in assuming that traditional systems have nothing to offer in light of capitalism, Western science, and biomedicine? Or are we cognitively constrained by our self-interested, cultural/social needs? What is the nature of our thought and the origins of our cultural paradigm?
To understand the Western cultural paradigm we must realize it is a product of history and of continual socialization under a certain set of ideals. In the days of Constantine, the binding of church and state enforced extreme social controls over the cultural beliefs and practices (Barbour 2000). Christianity strictly enforced the banishment of paganistic practices, separating our culture from the knowledge and reality of alternative religious forms. The Christian church is one of the few religions that exists in the world without a “supernatural” criteria for its leaders. Instead, this political system was based on ancient cultural writings that spoke the “truth” and would not allow members of society to deviate from it. The Book of Revelation (1976) explains the laws and consequences of disobedience:
But outside the city are the perverts and those who practice magic, the immoral
and the murderers, those who worship idols and those who are liars both in words
and deeds (22.15)
I, John, solemnly warn everyone who hears the prophetic
words of this book: if anyone adds anything to them, God will add to his punishment
the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes anything away from the
prophetic world of this book, God will take away from him his share of the fruit of
the tree of life and of the Holy City, which are described in this book. He who gives
his testimony to all this says, “Yes indeed! I am coming soon!” So be it. Come,
Lord Jesus! (22.18-20)
This passage exemplifies the strict authoritative social controls of the Christian teachings, and the limitations it had placed on our cultural paradigm. This system of belief was founded by the hierarchical powers of our society long ago and has been thoughtlessly reinforced through modes of transmission maintaining itself over time (Brodie 1996).
In the days when Christianity was enforced, all other forms of religious belief and practice were eliminated from our cultural experiences and remained extinct in our culture for millenniums. Murphy (1992) illustrates:
Like all our other attributes, metanormal cognition is subject to
cultures formative agencies. Because culture constantly shapes us,
reinforcing or extinguishing our greater possibilities, we need to
know what science and scholarship tell us about its formative power. (161)
Supernatural abilities and the wide range of cognitive potential is apparent throughout the world. However, due to our loss of these abilities and the lack of this knowledge in our culture, alternative practices seem unbelievable from our standpoint. Instead, we continue to honor our integrity, believing that since this type of reality does not exist in our culture, others believing in this reality are confused or lacking of a better explanation. In a culture marked by imperialism, competition becomes our objective for survival. If the Western world is not aware of aspects of human cognitive potential, they assume that it does not exist. It is inconceivable to the Western paradigm for another culture to be superior in a form of knowledge, since this would crush the “Western superior position” comprising the competitive illusions that form our (self-serving and controlling) integrity.
Christianity not only impressed upon us our conception of religious phenomena, but it prohibited us from contemplation, curiosity, and methods of reasoning to understand and operate within the world, which would run counter to the Christian church (Barbour 2000). For Christian purposes of maintaining power, when science arose in history as contradictory to religious thought, it was debased and separated itself from this alternative domain. As a result, science in our culture developed separately from our religious reality, and has become our basis for belief and fact. Science, due to its separation from religion and was thought to be unique, only existing in our culture. However, in other cultures science and religion developed together, operating by a system of logic and subject to various methods of scientific inquiry.
Metaphysics, shamanism, and meditation are all examples of science and religion that exist in other cultures. Hortin (1982) describes the differences in logical epistemologies of both traditional and progressivist cultures. She writes:
Traditional is a ‘consensual mode of theorizing. I mean a situation which all
members of a community, differences over matters of detail not withstanding,
share a single over-arching framework of secondary theoretical assumptions and
carry our intellectual innovation with in that framework. Progressivist is a
‘competitive’ mode of theorizing. By a competitive mode of theorizing I mean a
situation involving competition between rival schools of thinkers promoting
mutually incompatible frameworks of secondary theoretical assumptions.
Traditional are innovating continually-legitimating belief by implicitly
acknowledging efficacy in relation to explanation prediction and control as the
ultimate criterion of cognitive validity. The body of theory persists with a long
run of predictive success. (239)
Again, the cultural paradigm of imperialism and domination become apparent when looking at our mode of theorizing. As a competitive system of thought, it is impossible to accept disciplines from other cultures as having equal validity. Our perceptions of biomedicine as “superior” and more efficient medical system, again, is a pattern of our imperialistic cultural paradigm. Our beliefs are shaped by the authorities throughout history and continually reinforced by our culture and by anthropologists as the truth. As the authors of Dying For Growth reiterate:
We possess a greater number of vaccines and drugs to prevent and
cure major diseases; far more accurate diagnostic methods, more
effective and less invasive medical interventions and more
sophisticated ways of distributing medical information. (5)
Is this statement true, or is it an illusion impressed upon us by the necessity of our cultural paradigm to believe this? The only methods used in scientific inquiry to test biomedicine rely on high correlative evidence and statistical probability, analogous to the traditional medicinal inquiry methods. Murphy comments about the nature of this statistical probability in The Future of the Body (1992):
Beecher wrote:
The constancy of the placebo effect, in a fairly wide variety of
conditions, including pain, nausea, and mood changes, suggest
that a fundamental mechanism is operating in these several cases,
one that surely deserves further study. Many “effective” drugs
have power only a little greater. To separate out even fairly great
true effects above those of a placebo is manifestly difficult or
impossible on the basis of clinical impression. Psychiatrist Arthur
Shapiro suggested that the history of medicine is largely the history
of placebo effects. When illness kept him bedridden in 1956, he read
through a 100-year file of medical journals to find recurring patterns
of treatment. “Medical fads came and went,” he wrote. “A treatment
would look wonderful, produce marvelous results and then disappear.
Something seemed to work.”A treatment’s reputation, the patient’s
expectations about it, the therapeutic setting, and the doctor’s belief
in his won diagnoses all contribute to medical success. As several
experiments have shown, even a capsule’s size shape, and color help
determine its effectiveness. (247-248)
So what determines the effectiveness of a treatment? The cultural paradigm would seem to have a large role in this determination based on the data. Furthermore, our beliefs or expectations would be reinforced, influencing our own reality. Lad, author of Ayurveda, (1984) questions the empirical validity of biomedicine saying:
Even in modern medicine, some concepts are proven to “work”
without the reasons behind the phenomena being fully understood;
e.g., though antibiotics are used to destroy the bacteria which form
toxins in the body, no adequate explanation exists to explain how and
why toxins are formed from bacteria. (20)
The other debatable point concerning biomedicine is whether it does have the largest number of vaccines and drugs to prevent illness. Although biomedicine is a large-scale, systematized practice, it has accumulated much of its medicine from colonial exploitation and adoption of numerous cultural systems of medicine. Narby writes:
74 percent of the modern pharmacopoeia’s plant-based remedies
were first discovered by “traditional” societies; to this day, less
than 2 percent of all plant species have been fully tested in
laboratories, and the great majority of the remaining 98 percent
are in tropical rain forests. The Amazonian representatives based
their position on experience: Pharmaceutical companies have a
history of going to the Amazon to sample indigenous plant remedies
and then of returning to their laboratories to synthesize and patent
the active ingredients without leaving anything for those who made
the original discovery. (38,39)
Again the self-interests of the Western culture are assured, while the indigenous people are exploited and not acknowledged. The numerous alternative medicines and practices that exist independent of biomedicine, despite its grand size, are undoubtedly greater number in the sum total compared to biomedicine. The Western cultural paradigm seems to crumble when the foundations are studied critically. However, in the interests of the biomedical practices, the truth is hidden and lies are fabricated to ensure the stability and growth of our institutional capitalistic structure. Due to our cultural imperialistic nature, continually beliefs are impressed upon the minds of humans and reinforced for those who cannot step outside this frame of reference and see that other realities exist with just as much strength, if not more.
In the 1960s, the anthropological emphasis on the emic perspective was revitalized by the school of Interpertivism, founded by Clifford Geertz (1973). Geertz believed that the only way to understand a culture properly was to understand what was occurring from the insider’s perspective. He advocated that religion must be studied from the insider’s point of view because it consists of a conscious activity which cannot be known from the observer. Geertz also explains that humans are “specifically graded in particular biological, psychological, or sociological processes,” and that anthropologists need to recognize the “cognitive relativism” of others. Geertz recognizes the value of learning from other cultural perspectives to understand a more holistic and objective reality about the nature of the human species. Hollis () writes:
Relativism, they say, is essential to all those disciplines such as
anthropology, sociology, and the history of institutions, ideas, and even
cognitive psychology, which account for the diversity of systems of
knowledge, their distribution, and the manner of their change. It is
those who oppose relativism and who grant certain forms of knowledge
a privileged status, who pose the real threat to a scientific understanding
of knowledge and cognition. (3-4)
Scientific method took a turn in the way it understood objectivism, as acknowledging the relativity of the observer as it influences the reality. Objectivism, rather than something that can be attained from an individual perspective, it can only be accessed from taking in account the various relative perspectives. In modern physics, it has been proven that the observer’s frame of reference not only determines what aspect of a multidimensional realty is studied, but it influences the results of the study as the accommodate the observers conscious interaction (Mindell 2000).
The frame of reference of the anthropologist skews the experience if they do not believe in what they are studying. To establish relationships with people in the culture, it is necessary for these people to relate to anthropologist on a level that they understand, find interesting, and that will allow for the respect of the informant in light of possible judgement. In this way, the informants accommodate the anthropologist, impinging on the natural conversations that would be different otherwise. For example, when I was in conducted my field study in Ghana, I found that what the conversations were skewed to the common Westerner who did not believe in the spiritual reality. When I and asked a Ghanaian what they thought of the traditional healing practices they would reply, “Oh, I do not believe in those fetish practices. I am a Christian!” However, upon further conversation I found that all Ghanaians believe in the traditional healing of their culture, along with the beliefs that accompany it. As my friend Mavis can be quoted, “Yeah, they all say that they don’t believe in the fetish practices, but they do! They all do.” (tape counter)
As it has been illustrated, the necessity of the emic perspective has been important on achieving each of the anthropological goals. Therefore, the essential methodology and only way to really understand the emic perspective, is to conduct participant observation as Geertz so eagerly advocated in the Interpretivism school. It is only from this position can a person learn from the other culture, understanding the beliefs and practices as they are taught from the practitioners within the culture. Observation from an etic perspective will only result in the reinforcement of our own cultural beliefs, relative to what we know and believe. It is an ignorant statement that an outsider cannot comprehend what is occurring from an insider perspective. This statement implies that another cultural system of knowledge cannot be learned. This is ethnocentric in the assumption that the basis of another cultural system of knowledge is not rational or logical. Furthermore, the argument that says from an outsider perspective an anthropologist can learn and understand more than from an insider perspective implies that once an anthropologist begins to learn a new perspective, they will forget the paradigm that they have been enculturated within for 50 years!! When this argument is explored, it becomes irrational in its attempts to rationalize, eliminating the numerous elements that destroy our cultural integrity, however these elements still must be factored in for the full equation that composes reality. As Radin writes, “The interpretations of outsiders can be subjective to a dangerous degree. They must not under any circumstances be regard as primary sources,” (Darnell 2001). The outsider perspective is often general, mislead, and inaccurate, producing irrelevant studies, in accordance with what is being practiced in another culture.
It is essential to be open to all beliefs in a culture, whether they appear illogical or not. What is illogical to the anthropologist is not understood from our cultural frame of reference. Sperber (1982) writes:
Apparently irrational beliefs are less irrational than mistaken. They
are part of attempted explanations of the world, which developed in
a rational way. It may well be that anthropological (and historical)
literature suggests by its very bulk and drift that people of other cultures
hold beliefs which are irrational by Western standards. It does not
warrant, however, more specific or more explicit claims on the
issue. (151,162)
A belief is determined logical and rational only if it is self-consistent with the matrix of ideas that contribute to an individuals paradigm of belief. The Western paradigm, however, is narrow and rejecting of multitude of beliefs that are accepted and believed in cultures all over the world. Narby (1995) writes:
the gaze of the Western specialist was too narrow to see the
two pieces that fit together to resolve the puzzle. The distance
between molecular biology and shamanism/mythology was an
optical illusion produced by the rational gaze that separates things
ahead of time, and as objectivism fails to objectify its objectifying
relationship, it also finds it difficult to consider its presuppositions. (78-79)
It is necessary to learn under the system of knowledge as a naïve student, with a Tabula Rasa, or blank slate as Radin describes. This does not mean believing without evidence, however attempting to understand and participate in practices provide the experiential evidence necessary. Also, by not rejecting seemingly illogical information, perhaps later it can be integrated with a larger series of experiences and understanding, bringing clarity on what was once difficult to grasp. Every culture has a rationality and a logical way of looking at the world. It is the duty of the anthropologist to work hard to discover and understand this rationality in their own heads.
By being open to beliefs, people have a drastically different experience with the culture. The more a person values and respects the traditional system, the more information and data is revealed on account of this legitimate interest. For a simplistic example, often times when I would tell someone what I was studying while I was there they were extremely skeptical of why I would want to study these practices. They would assure me that they do not believe in such things. When I revealed my high respects for the traditional healers and exemplified my knowledge and understanding of them, eventually their attitude changed and I had established trust among them. Repeatedly I would hear stories and be told information about their experiences or experiences with family or friends, along with their true opinions concerning it, in direct opposition of what I was being told upon first meeting. Traditional healers would often come to greet me and take me out with them to participate in their practices. The fact that I was knowledgeable on the basics of their beliefs, the conversations went deeper, into come complex ideas and understandings. If an anthropologist is studying the traditional healing, however not believing in what they are studying (or open to believing), they are extremely removed from the actually reality that exists. This is true in a variety of ways. First an observer will discount important variables while fabricating through Western assumptions a variety of variables which do not exist. Furthermore, if they are not knowledgeable on the ways that conscious energies interact and there is a strong desire for the observing anthropologist to prevent a “magical” event from happening, often practitioners in other cultures are intimidated by this foreign observer and are unable to dominate the foreigner’s conscious energy and allow their own conscious mind to take over the physical reality. Therefore, the anthropologist entering a foreign culture with a discouraging mental paradigm to the practitioners will make the environmental conditions unconducive for operating on a supernatural level due to their psychic contribution to the reality.
In modern American anthropology, however, there are many debates surrounding the authenticity of numerous anthropologists who have been initiated and write from their participant, emic perspectives. Although these are the only anthropologists who truly understand, can describe, and accurately portray the emic beliefs and practices of the foreign culture, these anthropologist have been unsuccessful in their ability to convey these teachings in comprehensible terms to the Western audience. For example, Carlos Castenada, and others in controversy, are not considered scholarly due to the absence of the etic perspective. Although this form of ethnography is not the most effective for the Westerner understanding, they should still be acknowledged as valuable anthropological works in their representation of other cultures. In Humanistic Anthropology (1991) this point is expressed:
With his increasing popularity came increasing criticism the very
idea of taking shamanic initiation seriously is absurd to many and
that rendering it meaningful is a substantial part of Castenada’s
contribution. Sapir advocated and Casteneda illustrated, the following anthropological emphases, among others: taking culture to the
level of the individual, incorporating the concrete human being
into our anthropological discourse, emphasizing the experiential
dimension of human existence, focusing on the therapeutic and
creative dimensions of cultural dynamics. To ignore the Don Juan
books, we have largely ignored Sapir’s programmatic writing.
As Sapir realized, the anthropologist as humanists would gave
to give up some of the abstract elegance of the “expert,” but would
balance this loss with a great gain in personal engagement, genuine
engagement rather than viewing human beings as variations on a
theme of culture, Sapir realized that we must give serious attention
to perspectives that view cultures as variations on the theme of
humanity.(80,87-88)
Therefore, it is clear by the experts of our anthropological past that this form of writing must be acknowledged as something valuable describing a foreign culture. The act of participant observation allows the anthropologist to really understand the reality, as they themselves are able to experience it. Participating in this reality does not change the anthropologist to the point that they do not still understand the etic perspective. Analysis and the comparative approach can be extremely useful to relate the anthropological information to the larger global context, and to connect it to the understandings and reflections that would be beneficial in from our cultural perspective. Jeremy Narby, also an anthropologist, who was initiated in Amazonia Peru, provides an excellent example of how our culture can benefit from the emic knowledge. He writes (1995):
During the past weeks, I had come to consider the perspective of
biologists could be reconciled with that of ayahuasqueros and that
both could be true at the same time. According to the stereoscopic
image I could see by gazing at both perspectives simultaneously.
This point of view was completely new to me and had changed
my way of looking at the world. (104)
It is possible, as Narby exemplifies and I have experienced as well, to understand both perspectives at once and be able to understand reality more holistically and objectively, bridging to realms of thought. Once a person is able to understand the emic perspective, it can by integrated and synthesized with the knowledge within our culture.
In conclusion, the current methodology that exists in anthropology is inefficient for accomplishing the goals of anthropology. These poor representations of other cultures that have had far reaching effects in reinforcing our cultural paradigm and creating detrimental dynamics for them in relation to the Western imperialistic system. The traditional cultures have tremendous amount of valuable knowledge and practices that being suppressed, and in some areas brought to extinction. Why do cultures abandon such valuable traditional systems in response to Western education? Their only way to have access to Western goods or have a global connection is if they allow our cultural imperialism to dominate them to the point where they have been “Westernized,” becoming a replica of ourselves. Our culture cannot co-exist with others, it must dominate, exploit, and create an underclass to trive off of. These acts are unconscious for most Westerners and hard for the mind to see from a relative perspective due to their cognitive limitations created by the matrix of beliefs that form our cultural paradigm. However, the significance of the emic perspective allow us to reflect on ourselves and learn about how we are perceived by others. This, I believe is the major reason we do not want to know what others think, calling for drastic changes on our relations. The emic perspective also opens the way for a wide variety of extremely efficient and powerful transformative practices to be learned about the nature of reality. As anthropologists, it is essential to be the leaders to break free from our ethnocentric minds, and view all perspectives as relative within a larger framework of understanding. The implications of conducting anthropological studies as a participant with an open mind, and as a student under another cultural system, will ultimately result in re-building the cultural integrity that we have been destroyed for decades, allowing for progression as a human species.