Читать книгу The Social Animal - W. Runciman G. - Страница 6

EVEN BEFORE OUR remote ancestors were in contact with the extinct people whom we now call ‘Neanderthals’, people of one kind, or in one group, or from one territory, have been curious about the behaviour of people other than themselves. Much of the curiosity is about their acquired behaviour: why do they wear such funny hats? how can they bear to eat that meat raw? what on earth are those pictures they’re painting all about? But questions about their imposed behaviour will occur no less readily to trained and untrained observers alike: how do they choose their leaders? what is the distribution of property among them? what are they either required or forbidden to do by the incumbents of roles with the power to see to it that they do?

Herodotus, the so-called ‘father of history’, can at least as plausibly be called the father of sociology. His famous book, written in the mid-fifth century BC, is primarily concerned to narrate the victory of the mainland Greeks over the invading Persians. But it is also a rich and fascinating repository of observations about other peoples, obtained by extensive travel and systematic analysis of oral traditions, eyewitness accounts and physical records. Although he does appear to have believed some things which he shouldn’t, such as that the walls of Babylon were 200 ‘royal cubits’ (300 feet!) high, it’s remarkable how often his account has been subsequently confirmed – in the most spectacular instance, by archaeological evidence about Scythian burial customs discovered less than half a century ago. What’s more, he articulates precisely the two fundamental aspects of all sociological enquiry: the recognition that every society is different from every other, but that all are at the same time variants of a universal human nature. Although, as Herodotus explicitly remarks, the members of all societies are inclined to take their own as the paradigm, none are any more entitled to do so than any others, however strongly they believe, now as then, that they are.¹

It follows from Herodotus’s approach that there are two different but equally valid responses which the members of one society will have to what they find out about another: ‘how unlike us they are!’ – yes, but at the same time: ‘how recognizable!’ Admittedly, all such comparisons have to start from somewhere – in the case of Herodotus, from the viewpoint of a Greek looking at non-Greeks – and different observers will always be interested in, and surprised by, different things. Thus: ‘They not only kill their prisoners of war but eat them!’, or ‘Black people are treated differently from white people over there!’, or ‘The state owns all the factories as well as the land!’, or ‘Would you believe it – in ancient Mesopotamia a nun could be a businesswoman, and in Anglo-Saxon England a priest could be a slave!’ But equally: ‘They admire successful athletes just like we do!’, or ‘Look how those late Roman bureaucrats behaved – no differently from ours!’²

Whatever the contrast being drawn between ‘our’ roles and ‘theirs’, sociologists owe it both to their readers and to themselves to get their basic observations right. This isn’t always as easy as it may seem. For a start, there is the language problem: if an English-speaking sociologist asks a French-speaking informant about the role of the informant’s boss, the English-speaking sociologist must beware of equating ‘patron’, which is what English speakers mean by ‘boss’, with ‘patron’, which isn’t. But even when both the sociologist and the native informant understand correctly what the other is saying, the sociologist may be misled by having failed to ask the right question. When Captain R. S. Rattray, a British colonial officer who had spent many years among the Ashanti of what was then, in the 1910s and ’20s, called the Gold Coast, asked his native informants why he had never been told that the Queen Mother used to outrank the King, they replied: ‘The white man never asked us this; you have dealings with and recognize only the men; we supposed the Europeans considered women of no account and we know you do not recognize them as we have always done.’³

This sort of experience is disconcerting enough. But even if the sociologist has asked all the right questions, the questions may not have been asked of the right people. Or the right people may, for reasons of their own, have given the wrong answers. A classic example is the account of female adolescence in Samoa by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Her account, which was uncritically accepted by an enormous readership for several decades after its publication in 1928, depicted a guilt-free world of permissive sexuality. But Mead had no detailed knowledge of Samoan society and language, she didn’t check what she was told by her 25 young informants against either direct observations of her own or alternative accounts by other, adult Samoans, and it never seems to have occurred to her that she might be being deliberately misled. It is, accordingly, no surprise that she should turn out to have got it quite badly wrong. The surprise is that it took so long for her mistakes to be diagnosed by other observers.⁴ But there are many other instances where researchers whose intellectual honesty (as opposed to their judgement) is not in doubt have applied themselves to explaining something which was never there to be explained – for example, explaining the emergence of ‘nuclear’ households of parents and children by contrast with a purely presumptive ‘extended family’ pattern attributed to the pre-industrial past, or explaining ‘new’ working-class lifestyles by contrast with a purely presumptive ‘proletarian’ culture attributed to nineteenth-century industrialization. Or take Captain Archibald Blair, who reported on the basis of an exploration carried out in 1789 that chiefs in the Andaman Islands were ‘generally painted red’. Nice try, Captain. But as the British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown discovered a little over a century later, the Andaman Islanders don’t have any chiefs.⁵

The difficult cases can be very difficult indeed. A notoriously intriguing one is the reception of yet another Captain (Cook this time) by the Hawaiian Islanders when he arrived there on board HMS Resolution in 1778. Did they or didn’t they regard him as a god? The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is sure that they did, given that Cook’s appearance was entirely consistent with their beliefs and expectations and that they had no previous direct acquaintance with Europeans. But the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere is sure that they didn’t; what they did (or so Obeyesekere believes) is deify him for their own political purposes after he had been killed in a scuffle which broke out during his third and unexpected visit. It’s a particularly difficult case for two reasons. First, the evidence, both historical and anthropological, is ambiguous and incomplete. But second, the question is such as to stir up just the kind of accusations of intellectual bad faith as in fact it has. For Obeyesekere, Sahlins is imposing on the natives of eighteenth-century Hawaii a white imperialist myth about their propensity to see visiting Europeans as gods. For Sahlins, Obeyesekere is imposing on them a myth of universal (but really only bourgeois European) rationalism which denies them their own coherent and distinctive culture. So far, at least, Sahlins seems to have had the better of the argument.⁶ But that’s not the point. The point is that if we could go back in time, check out the evidence as it has come down to us, interview the people involved, and observe how they actually behaved, we’d know for sure. The conclusion to be drawn isn’t that arguments of this sort are difficult to settle conclusively (they are), or that they can be used to fight ideological battles of the here and now (they can), or that they touch on deep philosophical issues about the nature of religious belief (they do). It’s that for all that, they are amenable in principle to empirical research.

Nor is it as if the issue is so difficult to resolve because of the distance in time and space between twentieth-century professors of anthropology and eighteenth-century Hawaiians or Englishmen. So it can be in any sociological enquiry, as much within a single society as between one society and another, or between the same society then and now. Sociologists can and do make mistakes about the roles of fellow-members of their own society no less than about those remote from them. Sometimes, indeed, an observer from a different society will do a better job than a native one. No American sociologist has ever written as perceptively about American society as did the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, published in 1835, remains to this day an inexhaustibly valuable source of insights into American modes of behaviour and thought. No better account of the state of English society at the end of the Napoleonic wars has been written than by the French historian Elie Halévy, whose England in 1815 was published in 1912. For a sociologist to be a fellow-member of the same group, community, institution or society as he or she has chosen to study is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of getting it right. What matters is, as in all branches of science, whether the conclusions which the reader is invited to accept can be checked by, and with, other observers of evidence which is there for all to see.

Besides, there’s no point in exaggerating the difficulties. There is no society anywhere in the world whose members’ behaviour is literally incomprehensible to the members of another. You can read writings by philosophers, including Wittgenstein himself, in which they devise imaginary examples of peculiar people who appear to attribute meaning to propositions which violate any rules of meaning known to ‘us’. In an article by the British philosopher John Skorupski, the reader is asked to imagine a society whose members believe that the drawing-pins which they carry about with them in matchboxes are identical with the Empire State Building.⁷ But no anthropologist has ever come back from anywhere in the world having found people who believe any such thing, any more than any anthropologist has ever found a people whose language proved impossible to learn. It may be difficult to establish exactly what meaning they attach to certain of their beliefs and the concepts in which they are expressed. But so it is back home. I have never read about an alien society whose religion struck me as any more bizarre than the Christian religion I was ostensibly reared in myself (Genesis, Incarnation, Resurrection, a God who is both Three and One, both Omnipotent and Benevolent, etc.). But I have no more difficulty in conducting meaningful social relationships with fellow-members of my own society who are serious, paid-up Christians than did the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard with the Azande of the Northern Sudan, whose beliefs about magic, oracles and witchcraft were totally alien to him. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard is on record as saying that ‘I found it strange at first to live among Azande and listen to native explanations of misfortunes which, to our minds, have apparent causes, but after a while I learned the idiom of their thought and applied notions of witchcraft as spontaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant’; and what is more, ‘I always kept a supply of poison for the use of my household and neighbours and we regulated our affairs in accordance with the oracles’ decisions. I may remark that I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of.’⁸

So: however difficult it may be to establish what a fellow human being is ‘really’ thinking and therefore doing, it is always possible to identify not only the traits characteristic of an alien culture but the practices defining the roles by which institutions and societies remote in both time and place are constituted. There is, for example, no problem in equating the ‘brothers-in-arms’ whom we find swearing allegiance to each other in late medieval England⁹ with the male hetairoi (‘companions’) who associated together with the same common objective of martial glory and lucrative plunder in archaic Greece many centuries earlier and miles away: in status-conscious, warlike, agrarian societies, young men without land of their own or a powerful patron have an evident incentive to join together in this way, whatever may be the other differences in both their cultural and their social environment. Likewise, when the French historian Fernand Braudel, in his magisterial study of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, reports the way in which the Spaniards treated the fellow-members of their society who were of Muslim descent, he himself equates it with the treatment of blacks by poor whites in the southern states of America; and there is no difficulty in identifying cases from a wide range of places and times where a dominant ethnic or religious group discriminates against a subordinate one in the same immediately recognizable way.¹⁰

No less easy to find are cases where the same pattern of social behaviour can be observed in two different societies but with a difference in the function which it performs in each. If you look at ancient Roman society during its expansion by conquest in the first and second centuries BC, you will find free men fighting in the legions and slaves cultivating the large agricultural estates; but if you look at some no less warlike Islamic societies of the Middle East a few centuries later, you will find free men cultivating the land and armies made up of slaves. This, admittedly, gives scope for some unproductive argument over the precise definition of ‘slavery’. Is the role of a slave soldier in an Islamic infantry regiment ‘really’ to be equated with that of a purchased chattel-slave in a Roman chain-gang? But, as always with such comparisons, the answer is not to quibble about the terms but to look at the practices which define the role. When you do – and the evidence is, in this instance, both abundant and reliable enough for the purpose – you will find that the institutional rules are such as in both cases to deny unequivocally to the ‘slave’ the power over his own person which attaches to the roles of the men who are institutionally defined as ‘free’. And from comparisons like these there emerges the distinction, as important in sociology as in biology, between homologues (similarities of form) and analogues (similarities of function). The Roman slave is the homologue of the Islamic soldier and the analogue of the Islamic cultivator; the Islamic slave is the homologue of the Roman cultivator and the analogue of the Roman soldier. If this prompts you to ask: but what about combining the functions in a single role?, the answer is: yes, there are some of those too. In societies as far apart in time and place as seventh-century T’ang China, medieval Saxony, fourteenth-century Prussia under the ‘Teutonic Knights’, seventeenth-century Sweden, and eighteenth-century Russia you will find ‘farmer-soldier’ roles, in which the practices of smallholding and militia service were combined. And this illustrates another point common to biological and sociological theory: evolution can come about through recombination, as well as mutation, of the units of selection.

Anyone observing a human society, including the observer’s own, will not only be curious about some more than other aspects of the social behaviour of its members, but curious about one level of social behaviour rather than another. If you have chosen to study work-groups in a factory, or schoolchildren in a classroom, or doctors and their patients in a hospital you will be engaging in a different sort of project from what you will be doing if you want to study a society’s institutions as such – its economy, or its type of government, or its form of organized religion. But not totally different. You can’t study groups, however small, without taking account of the institutional context of the behaviour you are studying, and you can’t study institutions, however large, without taking account of the behaviour of individual incumbents of specific roles. The leading British sociologist David Lockwood pointed out in an influential article published in 1964 that ‘system’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between institutions – is quite different from ‘social’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between groups.¹¹ You may very well find that in the society you are studying there is much more of one than of the other: in societies as far apart as, for example, nineteenth-century Haiti and Egypt under the Mamluks, consistently high levels of inter-group hostility and violence were maintained within a largely unchanged set of economic, ideological and political institutions.¹² But you can’t prise the two apart. You are always looking at the behaviour of people in roles; and there is not, and never will be, a society in which it is impossible to identify those roles or to trace their relations to each other at both the group and the institutional level.

Once, however, you have identified the society’s constituent roles, you may want to proceed in either of two very different directions. You may, on the one hand, want to go on to ask ‘why are these roles as they are?’ (a question which itself, as we shall see in a moment, can be interpreted in several different ways). Or you may, on the other hand, want to ask ‘what is it like to be one of the people occupying and performing one of these roles?’ This second question, obviously, is one which doesn’t arise at all in physics or chemistry. Not that it only arises in the study of the behaviour of human beings: some of the most remarkable recent research into the social behaviour of primates is directed precisely to establishing how far they do or don’t attribute to each other minds like their own.¹³ But this book is about the social behaviour of humans, and therefore organisms with minds which have the inborn capacity for all the richness and subtlety of language as spoken only by us. And it is this which gives the question ‘what is it like to be a whatever-you-are?’ not only its perennial interest but also its peculiar difficulties.

Unconvinced readers, fresh perhaps from ‘postmodernist’ texts, may protest that since I have already conceded the difficulty of establishing beyond argument what somebody else is ‘really’ thinking, I am hardly entitled to claim that even the most experienced sociologist can ever test an account of what is going on inside other people’s heads in the way that an explanatory hypothesis about the externally visible influences on other people’s externally visible behaviour can be tested if the requisite evidence is there. But there are two answers to this. First, the way to test a description of someone else’s subjective experience is to try it out on that person; unless that person is deliberately seeking to mislead, as one or more of those teenage Samoan girls appear to have deliberately deceived the gullible Margaret Mead, the observer’s description can be progressively expanded and refined to accord with what the person is willing to confirm as authentic. Second, in explanation just as much as in description, there comes a point at which, to borrow a metaphor from Wittgenstein, the spade is turned; children quickly discover that if they respond to every answer to a question ‘why?’ with another ‘why?’, the adult interlocutor is soon helpless. No sociologist – or psychologist – claims to be able literally to recreate the mental state of one person inside the mind of another. No heterosexual lover who has ever interrogated a partner about exactly what it feels like at the moment of orgasm will need to be told that empathy has a limit. But it would be absurd to conclude that different people can convey nothing to each other about the nature of their different subjective experiences. Indeed, it is sometimes the very incommensurability of subjective experience which can be deployed to good rhetorical effect. If a friend who has recently been bereaved says to you, ‘My sense of desolation was more all-consumingly painful than you can possibly imagine’, this may help you to understand the experience – understand it, that is, in the empathic, descriptive sense – better than any other words your friend might have chosen instead.

But however conducted, the exercise is a quite different one from the formulation of an explanatory hypothesis with which to account for the behaviour in question. It not only employs different techniques, but appeals to different standards, is open to different criticisms, and follows different rules. What’s more, the description of a pattern of social behaviour as experienced by those whose behaviour it is may be not only at variance from, but in flat contradiction with, the hypothesis which turns out to explain it correctly. Nor is there anything to be surprised at in this, since, as any psychologist will tell you, all of us are likely to be mistaken about the causes of our own behaviour. Not totally, perhaps, and not always. But often enough for the disjunction between why we do what we do and what it is like for us to do it to be as important a feature of our social lives as any of the large-scale crises and upheavals for which sociologists studying our behaviour may be lying in wait at the institutional or societal level.

Descriptions of subjective experience, particularly at the cultural level, have traditionally been the domain of anthropologists rather than sociologists. But the division of labour between the two is largely conventional. Anthropologists tend to study alien cultures by living in them for a year or two and then reporting to their uninitiated compatriots on the curious habits and customs of the Azande, !Kung San, Eskimos, Hopi Indians, or whoever it may be. Nothing prevents them from doing the same back home. You can do fieldwork in Totnes as well as Tahiti. But as the range of such studies has broadened and their methods been refined, so has there increased the volume of debate on the same dilemma as arises from the travels of Herodotus or the arrival in Hawaii of Captain Cook. ‘They’ see the world very differently from the way in which ‘we’ do, and believe very different things about it. So what are the right terms for ‘us’ to use in describing ‘them’? Ours or theirs?

If the question is put that way, the answer has to be ‘theirs’. But it’s a mistake to put it that way. It’s true that anyone studying a society remote in either place or time from their own is likely to have to grasp ideas and beliefs very different from the culture in which they themselves were reared. But the measure of their success is precisely their ability to translate them back, as Evans-Pritchard and many other anthropologists have done, into terms comprehensible to ‘us’; and the fact that it can be done is a conclusive demonstration that ‘we’ and ‘they’ are both variants of that same universal human nature acknowledged by Herodotus within which we and they are neither more nor less peculiar than each other. When, therefore, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz enjoins his fellow-anthropologists in a much-quoted article to ‘hawk the anomalous’ and ‘peddle the strange’,¹⁴ he is denying the very presupposition which legitimates his own professional practice. Who’s more exotic, Professor? You or them? What makes those Balinese cockfights you’re telling us about¹⁵ any more anomalous or strange than those baseball games at the Yankee Stadium? And while you’re about it, perhaps you can help us to understand an anomalous society like yours in which the topmost political role can be occupied by a former Grade B movie actor of limited intelligence called ‘Ron’ whose schedule is arranged for him by his wife under the guidance of an astrologer, and a strange culture like yours whose inherited complex of myths and symbols includes a pervasive totemic cult of an anthropomorphized duck called ‘Donald’ and an anthropomorphized mouse called ‘Mickey’.

Geertz’s article is called ‘Anti-anti-relativism’ because his perfectly legitimate concern is to emphasize how very different from one another different cultures and societies are. But the title is a pity all the same since relativism is a problem in philosophy – or, more strictly, in epistemology – rather than anthropology and sociology. The reason is simple. Any practising anthropologist or sociologist who takes epistemological relativism seriously has no option but to quit work. It’s one thing to recognize that ‘our’ beliefs and values are not inherently privileged over ‘theirs’, but quite another to conclude that ‘we’ can therefore never make meaningful judgements of any kind about ‘them’. What’s the point of going out to do fieldwork among either the Balinese or the North Americans if all you’re going to be able to come back with is an arbitrary description in untranslatable terms of their unreachable ideas about their illusory culture? If there is any pay-off from ‘anti-anti-relativism’, it is that it re-emphasizes the precept that since the results of anthropological, as of any other, research are a function not only of the evidence but of the assumptions with which the researcher approaches it, you had better be careful not to take your assumptions for granted. The dictum that ‘the point of view creates the object’ – which it does in natural and social science alike – may not have much immediate impact on the research of, say, a demographer who just wants to know by how much the Chinese birth-rate is going up or down or a political scientist who just wants to know how many female American voters have voted for one presidential candidate rather than another. It’s obviously more relevant where the research is of the kind which can be vitiated by the unexamined assumptions of observers like those white men who didn’t think to ask the Ashanti about the role of their Queen Mother. But to point that out is not to undermine the status of anthropology as a serious academic discipline. On the contrary: it’s all part of encouraging the next generation of anthropologists to get the cultures they choose to study more nearly right.

What, then, is the difference between getting it right in the explanatory (‘why?’) and the descriptive (‘what is it like?’) sense? Imagine yourself first to be a sociologist or anthropologist, whether in Totnes or Tahiti, trying to clinch the validity of a powerful-seeming explanatory hypothesis about ‘their’ behaviour which has dawned on you, and then to be the same sociologist or anthropologist trying to make sure that a convincing-looking description of it which you have put together from your field-notes is truly authentic. As the first, you will be looking, ideally, for a decisive piece of evidence – an artefact, a document, a set of statistics, an observed pattern or sequence of behaviour – which will rule out alternative explanations but accord with your own. But as the second, you will be collecting a whole range of ancillary observations which will cumulatively reinforce the impression of ‘what it was like’ which you want to convey to your readers. If one of Professor Geertz’s students were to say to him, ‘I’ve read your article, but I still can’t imagine taking cockfights as seriously as the Balinese do’, Geertz’s best tactic would be to load the student up with further details, other firsthand accounts, apposite metaphors or similies, and parallels from the student’s own culture – including, perhaps, a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium – until the message finally gets home.

There’s another revealing symptom of the difference, too. Explanation typically involves spotting a presumptively causal connection – without agriculture no feudalism, or whenever capitalism then democracy, or the Second World War because previously the First World War. But description typically involves what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing as’.¹⁶ I cited Wittgenstein earlier as a philosopher whose fanciful examples of social behaviour, useful as they may be to philosophers concerned with the meaning of meaning, are useless if not positively misleading for practising sociologists or anthropologists. But on the mental process of ‘seeing as’, as he expounds it in his Philosophical Investigations, what he has to say is directly to the point. As an example (mine, not his), imagine yourself looking at a bulky, upright Remington typewriter of about the year 1900, and trying to see it as it would have been seen in the year in which it was made – as, that is, a piece of exciting, novel, up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art technology. Can you do it? Try as I may, I’m not sure that I can. But the imaginative exercise required is the same as when an anthropologist tries to see a totem pole or a rain dance or an animal sacrifice or a Disney cartoon as ‘they’ see them. You don’t do it by tracing the sequence of causes and effects which has made the objects of your curiosity what they are. You do it by bringing to bear your knowledge of the cultural context in which they occur and the language employed by the native informants whom you have interrogated about their significance to ‘them’. And, once again, it’s no different for a Balinese anthropologist trying to understand (in the emphatic, descriptive, ‘what-is-it-like?’ sense) a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium than for Professor Geertz trying to understand a Balinese cockfight.

Suppose, however, that seeing things as ‘they’ see them entails acceptance of beliefs which ‘we’ know to be false (or at any rate think we know to be false – the point stands even if we later decide that we were wrong). Let’s go back to Evans-Pritchard among the Azande. He finds it quite easy to behave as if he shared their beliefs. But he can’t and therefore doesn’t actually share them, and he therefore can’t, whatever further enquiries he makes, see the poison oracle as they do, any more than I can see the wafer in the hand of the Catholic priest as the body of Christ. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t – not for the purposes of sociology. We don’t have to share their beliefs in order to grasp their meaning to them and convey it to you, our readers. You don’t, I assume, share any more than Herodotus did the belief of his Scythian informants that every member of the Neurian tribe is a once-a-year werewolf. But you can still grasp the concept (and enjoy the movie, too, if you don’t find it too scary). Indeed, think what would happen if sociologists and anthropologists did all come to share the beliefs of the people whose patterns of behaviour they had been studying. They could only explain the behaviour correctly if the correct explanation had already been arrived at by those whose behaviour it was. And how often would that be?

What’s more, this applies as much if not more when the beliefs in question are those of rulers, activists and decision-makers as when they are those of sociology professors. Rulers, activists and decision-makers all have explanations of their own of why the societies to which they belong are as they are as well as prescriptions of their own about how their societies ought to be changed for what they consider to be the better. But their memoirs are notorious for their unreliability. Only the most unsophisticated reader will be any more disposed to take them at face value than Evans-Pritchard to agree with his Zande informants that their misfortunes are due to the fact that one or more of their neighbours is a witch. But as you read the selective and tendentious reminiscences of important people, from Julius Caesar and before to Winston Churchill and since, and contrast them in your mind with the accounts of the same events given by uninvolved observers who have sought to test alternative possible explanations against one another, don’t you at the same time find the disjunction between the two entirely comprehensible? As a species, we are not only a compulsively social but a compulsively self-justifying animal, and the autobiographies of politicians need to be checked for their veracity and lack of misleading insinuations and omissions no less carefully than those of philosophers do (Bertrand Russell’s is a classic in this regard).¹⁷ But the disjunction between what it felt like to the autobiographer at the time, and how it is going to be explained by revisionist professors fifty years after the autobiographer’s death, is not a reason to question that that was what it felt like. The sociologist studying the societies in which the Great and Good (or Bad) occupied and performed their political roles may be as curious about the one as about the other, and increasingly struck by the irony inherent in the discrepancy between the two. But the discrepancy doesn’t of itself make it any more difficult to arrive at an authentic description or a valid explanation – or both. On the contrary, understanding the delusions of grandeur that led to the downfall of Croesus or Louis Napoleon or Margaret Thatcher may make the causes of it all the easier to see.

But explanation, in sociology or elsewhere, can mean several different things. Why, to go back to my earlier example, do I shake hands with you when I’m introduced to you? Because I don’t wish to seem impolite, because that’s how I was brought up, because it strengthens social ties within our community, because a mutual friend decided that we should meet, because in our culture that’s what we do instead of rubbing noses, or because in ruder and more violent times the symbolic meaning of a handshake was that neither of us held weapons in our hands?

That isn’t even an exhaustive list. But for the practising sociologist the important distinction is the threefold one between genetic, motivational and functional explanations. This difference does not, let me emphasize, correspond to the difference between evoked, acquired and imposed behaviour: explanations of each kind can be sought for all three. But sociologists are, typically, more likely both to be studying imposed behaviour and to be looking for functional explanations. Let me go back once more to the example of infantry drill in seventeenth-century Europe. If you want to know where it came from, the answer lies in a narrative account of the development by Maurice of Nassau, captain-general of Holland and Zeeland for forty years from 1585, of systematic routines for marching and countermarching, loading and discharging matchlock guns, and transmitting words of command down through co-ordinated tactical units. If you want to know what influenced the people involved, the answer lies in the careers and ambitions of the leaders of early modern European armies on the one side and the dispositions and responses of volunteer or conscripted foot-soldiers on the other – responses which may, as I’ve pointed out already, be explained as much by an unconscious bonding effect of co-ordinated movement to the sound of drums or music as by a cultural process of deliberate imitation or learning. But if you want to know why it came to transform the way in which wars were fought, the answer lies in the competitive advantage which armies so drilled enjoyed over their opponents and the function which drill performed in promoting discipline during training and garrison duty as well as on the field of battle.

The same distinction can be made on topics which fall more nearly within the domain of one of the specialized social sciences. If, for example, you are an economist studying the automobile industry, you may want to know about the initial commercial exploitation of the internal combustion engine, in which case you will need to find out about the cost – benefit calculations which showed it to be worthwhile. Or you may want to know about the appeal of the product to its potential purchasers, in which case you will need to find out about not only its utility as a mode of transport but also the effect of advertising in expanding consumer demand for it and the part played by peer-group imitation or rivalry in raising its priority as an item of household expenditure. Or you may want to know why some manufacturers have been more successful than others, in which case you will need to find out about production techniques, marketing strategies, tariff barriers, and rates of technological innovation and obsolescence. Indeed, you may well want to draw directly on models derived from the theory of natural selection, as a number of economists have done, in order to explain why some particular firms and their particular products win out over others in competition for market share.¹⁸

These examples can also be used (as the handshake example can) to illustrate the difference between the approaches of sociologists or anthropologists on the one hand and historians on the other. There is a familiar contrast, much discussed by philosophers of social science, between narrative explanations (‘because he couldn’t find a horse, the King of Ruritania lost the battle and therefore his kingdom’) and lawlike explanations (‘all monarchies, including the Ruritanian, depend on some kind of religious legitimation’). But the contrast mustn’t be overdrawn. Narrative explanations presuppose underlying regularities of certain kinds which must be true if the particular chain of causal connections is to hold; lawlike explanations are valid across the range of instances to which they are applied only if specific historical conditions are presupposed too. Lack of a horse only leads to the loss of a kingdom in a context to which implicit generalizations about certain forms of warfare apply, just as religious legitimation of a monarchy can only come about after a series of events which were contingently sufficient for it to do so. Sociologists, it could accordingly be said, are all closet historians (and historians closet sociologists).

For example: Madagascar is an exceptionally interesting area to study, not only because it is an island but because, over the course of the past 200 years, a network of small, scattered kingdoms has been replaced, first, by a central bureaucratic state employing slave labour, second, by a colonial regime which abolished slavery at the same time as imposing its own political institutions, and third, by a post-colonial government serviced by a professional, administrative and commercial bourgeoisie. This intriguing evolutionary pattern, convincingly analysed in the work of the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, presents a wide range of different contrasts which call for a correspondingly wide range of explanatory hypotheses. But if your interest is in the first of the three transitions, you will find yourself drawn to the particular sequence of events whereby a particular nineteenth-century king, having captured a sufficient number of slaves to exploit to the full the rice-growing potential of a particular territory, was able to exchange the surplus for European weapons which had by then become available and with them to capture yet more slaves and thereby build up a momentum of conquest which put his kingdom in control of the whole of Madagascar.¹⁹ This is not only a textbook example of a narrative explanation; it also tells specifically against a would-be lawlike one since any generalization of the form of ‘whenever one of a number of competing states gains priority of access to more advanced military technology it will establish a momentum of conquest sufficient to guarantee victory’ can be demolished by counter-examples from other times and places where the other conditions which were necessary in the case of Madagascar failed to obtain.

But suppose that your interest is not in the political history of Madagascar, but on the contrary in the patterns of traditional social behaviour which have persisted throughout the successive changes of regime. Bloch draws attention to the persistence of a ritual of circumcision in which the ceremony is performed and the traditional blessing given by a chosen ‘elder’.²⁰ He holds that in Madagascar, as elsewhere, such rituals are a function of institutionalized inequality, and is therefore unsurprised that the role of the persons chosen as ‘elders’ under each successive regime should turn out to be constant not in its defining practices but in its rank: in the first period, the ceremony is performed by local kinship group elders; in the second, by royal administrators; in the third, by French colonial officials; and in the fourth, by prominent local capitalists. QED. Notice, however, that he is explicitly not processing a lawlike generalization of the form of ‘the amount of ritual communication in a society varies with the social distance between its constituent roles’. What he says is that institutionalized inequality is what rituals like this one are about. To explain them, accordingly, involves an analysis of both the meaning of the ritual to the participants and the features of the history and culture of Madagascar which account for the successive replacement of one kind of ‘elder’ by another. And yes, there is a valid generalization which can be framed, if you want it, to the effect that people prefer their domestic ceremonies presided over by persons of higher rather than lower rank. Would any professor of anthropology be flattered to have his or her inaugural lecture chaired not, as advertised, by the university vice-chancellor in academic robes, but by a bare-footed freshman in an unwashed T-shirt?

All this, however, brings us back to the need for genetic, motivational and functional explanation in the study of human social behaviour. For example: in many different societies, there are communities and subcultures where the advantages of behaviour which the dominant ideology defines as ‘criminal’ outweigh the disadvantages. Parts of London and Newcastle, as of Chicago and Los Angeles, are obvious examples. Able-bodied young males are likely to be at least part-time occupants and performers of the role of ‘thief’: the chances of being caught are small, there is no alternative employment on offer which is both legitimate and gainful, there are easy pickings in the more affluent community down the road, and so on. Yes, but why exactly do they do it? Is it through rational choice, unthinking conformity to the peer-group, class or ethnic hatred, innate predisposition, an urge to escape from boredom, pathological greed, or what? However obvious the function, we still want to know why those who do it do and those who don’t don’t, and which of the relevant features of the environment would need to be changed for those who do not to want to any longer. It still isn’t a question to be answered by taking their own account of why they do it at face value: if, for example, they say that they do it because they are driven to it by poverty, the street-wise sociologist will wait for evidence of their changing their thieving behaviour when they cease to be poor. But don’t we still want to know what motivates them to do it as well as how they started and what they get out of it? Of course we do.

Ideally, therefore, the explanation of an observed pattern of human social behaviour will not only link a motivational to both a genetic and a functional hypothesis but provide a theoretical underpinning for all three. You don’t need a sociology degree before you notice that young men are more aggressive than elderly women. But maybe you do need a sociology degree (with some biology and psychology courses thrown in) before you can produce an adequate answer to the question: why does what looks like a causal connection between young maleness and a propensity to violence hold good? We need not just the evidence which might, but doesn’t, invalidate the claim that the connection is causal. We also need an explanation for the explanation. To take a textbook example from physical science, the discovery of a causal connection between altitude above sea level and the boiling point of water was made long before the notion of atmospheric pressure provided the theoretical grounding for it. In sociology, we are still a long way from the sort of grounding of wide-ranging causal hypotheses in deep and powerful theories which has been achieved in both physical and biological science. But that’s part of what makes it such a fascinating subject to pursue. Whatever (exactly) it is that you want to know, there is plenty left to find out about how we all behave as social animals, and there are plenty of alternative hypotheses available to explain it when you do.

Then what, in all this, about the philosophers, preachers and poets? Don’t they offer both explanations and descriptions of patterns of human social behaviour as valid and authentic as those put forward by academic social scientists? Well – nothing stops them. Nietzsche’s writings, to take a celebrated example, contain a number of sociological conjectures about the evolution of human nature for which he himself claimed ‘scientific’ status, including his view of systems morality as expressions of sublimated feelings of resentment towards those with power on the part of those without it. But Nietzsche wasn’t setting out systematically to test a set of explanatory hypotheses against the evidence most likely to conflict with them. He was, for his own very different purposes, constructing a just-so story about the ‘genealogy of morals’ and using it to subvert the conventional view of what human beings are doing in passing judgement on each other’s behaviour at all. The writings of philosophers, preachers and poets are sociology to the extent that the authors make them so. Some of the most potent intellectual cocktails yet mixed, like Freud’s, derive their potency precisely from the cunning, not to say dangerous, way in which they combine the two: would-be therapeutic regimes derived from a psychoanalytic theory which fails the standard tests to which new therapeutic drugs are routinely subjected may turn out to do more harm than good. But the difference between the kinds of conclusions to which the reader is asked to assent is still the same. It isn’t up to you or me whether Sahlins or Obeyesekere is right about the Hawaiians’ reception of Captain Cook, even though our respective ideological presuppositions may lead us to hope and expect that it’s the one rather than the other. But we do have, and will continue to have, a further element of discretion in deciding whether or not we share Nietzsche’s unflattering view of the Christian conception of morality, even after every item of relevant evidence is in.

To emphasize the difference as firmly as I have been doing is not – repeat not – to question that to analyse it is a philosophical rather than a scientific exercise: the philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy, not of science. So when the French philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida, in his book On Grammatology, announces to his readers that the nature of the difference between a philosophical and an empirical question isn’t simply an empirical question, the (or at least, my) surprise is that he feels the need to italicize it.²¹ Who is he contradicting? There is always scope for argument over the borderline. But no contemporary sociologist or philosopher holds that the conceptual distinction between conceptual and empirical questions is ‘simply empirical’. Likewise, when textbooks on the philosophy of social science correctly insist that social scientists themselves are both its subjects and its objects, who wants to say otherwise? The question is: what follows? And the answer is that although social scientists are on that account exposed to the risk of making mistakes of a kind which doesn’t arise at all in the study of inanimate nature, it doesn’t prevent them from formulating explanatory hypotheses about their own and other people’s behaviour which can be tested by the same criteria of validity. Empirical sociologists talking about facts and their causes are apt to be denounced by their more philosophically minded colleagues as ‘positivists’. By this, the anti-positivists usually mean to imply a nefarious commitment to an ideology of science which denies the truism that the practice of science raises some genuinely philosophical issues. But when they come to attack the empiricists’ specific conclusions, you can bet that they will tacitly acknowledge the existence of empirical criteria by which observations of, and hypotheses about, patterns of human social behaviour stand and fall. Or if they persist in maintaining that all ‘social facts’ are ‘ideological constructions’, you need merely ask them whether, if charged by a court of law with a murder committed by somebody else, they would accept that their innocence was only an ideological construction (which the concept of ‘murder’ as an act of intentional, wrongful killing self-evidently is), and not in any sense a ‘fact’.

There is, to be sure, nothing self-contradictory in doing both. All students of human social behaviour, whatever label they attach to themselves, are free to draw on whatever empirical observations they like in order to persuade their readers to share their personal convictions about the human condition, the meaning of history, the phenomenology of the life-world, the postmodern experience, the contradictions of rationality, the dualism of knowledge and action, the existential dilemma, the ontology of social life, the paradox of reflexive subjectivity, and so on and so forth. The sociologists of the kind whom their opponents denounce as ‘positivists’ are apt to be no less contemptuous of those whom they in their turn denounce as practitioners of ‘substitute religion’. But each is as legitimate an intellectual activity as the other. The two are not in competition except in the trivial sense that professors giving lectures of the one kind may be competing for student audiences with professors giving lectures of the other. One of the most influential contemporary practitioners of ‘substitute religion’ is the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose ambition (if I understand him correctly) is to formulate the ideal conditions under which rational human beings could communicate with each other free of the constraints imposed by ‘positivist’ social theory and the social institutions which it reflects. It is, in my judgement, a heroic but ultimately self-defeating intellectual enterprise. But whether my judgement is right or wrong, it’s an enterprise as fundamentally different as Nietzsche’s is from seeking first to distinguish and then to explain the different patterns of human social behaviour to be found in the historical and ethnographic record and then, if the researcher is so minded, to describe what they have been like, subjectively speaking, for the people whose patterns of behaviour they are. The only kind of philosophical argument to which this book stands categorically opposed is one which seeks to deny that empirical sociology is possible at all. But that sort of argument is best countered simply by doing what the sceptic says can’t be done; and, as I’ve hinted already, you will find even the most anti-positivist practitioners of substitute religion doing it too, where and when it bolsters their arguments of the other kind.