Thursday, November 20, 2014

Ideal types: psychology vs. social sciences

All social theory is Invisible Pink Unicorns, because none of those ideal types actually exist. However, they help think about those invisible things, social facts, that often are more important than the visible and the obvious. Human psychology too can be understood in a similar way, by way of ideal types and theories (their veracity is gauged by their therapeutic effect). It's just as huge universe as the social one. However, even a better way to understand inner worlds is empirical, by directing your investigative gaze from the outside to the inside. There are many methods of doing that, definitely more surefire and empirical than many methodologies from social sciences at that. Kind of like Weberian Verstehen, only directed inwards.

Human universals and cultural differences

The challenge is to realise that human universals and cultural differences coexist, they are just two extrema of the same continuum. Anthropology focuses too much on cultural differences, hence the perennial malaise of culturalism.

How can we gain that kind of understanding? By gaining self-knowledge first, deconstructing the invisible omniscient "objective" scientific observer empirically, beyond intellectual declarations. How can you talk about others, if you really don't know your self?

By self-knowledge I mean going beyond the obvious and observable. And that takes stepping outside the conventional Cartesian mode of scientific cognition, which by our times has largely exhausted its potential in social sciences. (The Post-Modernist crisis sort of points towards that critically but offers no way out).

Relying solely on the observable and measurable in understanding inner worlds is really bad 1950s behaviourism. I call its latter-day manifestations in social sciences "crypto-positivism". We've luckily come a long way from that when talking about social facts, but it will take a bit of a revolution to acknowledge and quit it when talking about inner worlds.

"If it walks, talks and looks like a duck, don't get too excited, it can very well be a duck simulachra."  Jean Baurdillard (apocryphal) 

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

What is identity?

... an illusionary habit of an unawakened mind and reaffirmed by a collective belief in its reality, somewhere between the minimum group paradigm and the mirror stage..

Monday, November 10, 2014

Reproducing the hierarchy

The only advantage that ruling elite haves is their training in a misplaced sense of entitlement that they later project onto the Great Unwashed to legitimise their power.
 
If you are born into the right family, you're trained to behave like a alpha, or fake it. That alone upholds the order. And that's how we end up ruled by clueless clowns who know how to look powerful and important.

Understanding mental illness

The biggest fallacy in understanding mental illness is ascribing its causes to one factor or locus. The psychological, the physiological and the social do not exist separately, that separation is a mental abstraction. Hence, any treatment should deal with all the aspects. Talking therapy + lifestyle changes + breathing techniques to re-balance your glandular system.

Friday, November 7, 2014

Ritual as a participatory affair

Victor Turner in his Forest of Symbols (1967) suggested to interpret ritual on three levels. Firstly, the exegetical level: "how they explain it", in other words, how the "locals". The there's the operational meaning: "what we can see", the minutiae of the observable "bells and whistles" that most anthropologists record in their ethnographies. And finally, there is the positional level: "how we, the educated, explain it", i.e., how the meaning of the ritual fits into the overall structure of the society. This last privileges understanding can only be achieved by  anthropologists trained in the high art of seeing structure, agency, liminality, and such in daily events. 

Despite such a analytical finery, all the three levels remain belong to the same domain, of rationalising the visible to the naked eye. The observer remains confused as to what is actually happening with the participants. The participant observation thus remains an observation, the participation part meaning "standing nearby": just like Bakhtin's carnival, which when observed loses its meaning and becomes a mere spectator sport. Thing with rituals is that once you've "gone local", it changes your forever, so the "fourth wall" between the scientific observer and the observed object of study is broken down. The subject and the object merge and that's how the illusion of separation collapses and empirical wisdom is gained.

Quantitative mehods are a big fat lie

Quantitative methods are a lie. The devil is always in operationalisation, the stage where you decide how to turn observable world into numbers, which is always inevitably based on unselfconscious ideological choices, beliefs and affects. Besides, there's the sheer imbecility of trying to reduce the entire complexity of reality to a relation between two variables. Hence, all quant-based sciences are pseudo-sciences or simply mouthpieces of power dressed up as a science.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Social sciences and the culturalist bias

The assumption that enculturation rationally responds to/replicates social structure is itself a product of rationality and is thus only self-referential at best, and most of times very misguiding. It bypasses any awareness of psychological processes and how responses are produced and internalised. This lack of self-knowledge/reflexivity (from the famous "know thyself" maxim) is the main obstacle in the modernist scientific method, the blindfold that keeps the blind men from seeing the entire elephant.

One keep getting reminded of that beautiful Dostoevsky's question (to the effect of): "So what happens once we've fed everyone?" Is it going to be a better society once wealth is redistributed more evenly? Not that I'm against it, by the way. It's just that the effects will be mostly limited to welfare and economy, more purchase power and people engaging in ever new consumerist frenzies, inventing new hierarchies and guarding their wealth from outsiders. Same ole, same ole...