Engaging with anthropology: key concepts and anthropological thinking practice questions.

Writing about his Trobriand fieldwork of the 1910s, Malinowski noted that elaborate magical rites accompanied fishing expeditions into the open sea beyond the reef, while fishing inside the sheltered lagoon was carried out with almost none. He took the contrast as evidence that

• magic survived only among those Trobrianders who had not yet learned reliable fishing techniques
• the lagoon was held to be a place where spirits were unwilling to intervene on behalf of the living
• magic and technical skill were rival explanations, and technical skill was steadily displacing magic
• magic clustered where technique alone could not secure the outcome

Answer: magic clustered where technique alone could not secure the outcome

The argument is about the distribution of magic, not about ignorance: the lagoon was predictable, the open sea was not, and the rites were concentrated where the risk lay. Reading magic as failed technology inverts Malinowski's point, since the same men fished expertly in both places.

Which description of the boatbuilders' knowledge is supported by the passage?

• It is transmitted through supervised practice and judged by the body rather than stated as rules
• It is a set of rules the builders hold but deliberately withhold from apprentices and from outsiders
• It is unreliable, since the builders cannot state the standard they are applying to the hull
• It is the same in kind as the written measurements, which the apprentice will consult once trained

Answer: It is transmitted through supervised practice and judged by the body rather than stated as rules

Much of what people know is embodied and shown rather than said, which is why long participation reaches it and an interview does not. The passage gives no sign of secrecy, and being unable to verbalise a standard is not the same as having none.

An anthropologist spends eighteen months in a genetics laboratory recording how results are argued over, written up and turned into accepted fact. Colleagues object that she is 'treating science as though it were a belief system'. The anthropological reply is that her project

• sets out to demonstrate that the laboratory's findings are mistaken and have been manufactured socially rather than discovered
• borrows a method that only works in communities without written records, and so cannot describe a laboratory
• describes how knowledge claims are produced and authorised, which leaves their truth untouched
• shows that scientists, unlike other people, work without any shared assumptions at all

Answer: describes how knowledge claims are produced and authorised, which leaves their truth untouched

Describing how a claim comes to count as knowledge is a descriptive project, not a verdict on the claim, and it makes biomedicine, law and divination comparable objects of study. The anthropology of science is routinely misread as debunking.

In her introduction an ethnographer states that she will treat the villagers' account of ancestral displeasure and the visiting agronomist's account of soil exhaustion 'symmetrically'. In practice this commits her to

• recording only the account that the villagers themselves found the more persuasive at the time
• deciding in advance which of the two accounts is correct, and then describing the dispute over the harvest in its light
• presenting the ancestral account as belief and the agronomist's account as established knowledge
• describing how each account is produced and defended, without ranking one as knowledge and the other as belief

Answer: describing how each account is produced and defended, without ranking one as knowledge and the other as belief

Symmetry means using the same descriptive vocabulary for claims one happens to accept and claims one does not, so that both can be examined in the same way. Sorting them into knowledge and belief at the outset settles the question the fieldwork was supposed to open.

Nineteenth-century writers such as Morgan explained similarities between distant societies by placing them on the same rung of a single ladder of progress. Boas, working on Baffin Island and the Northwest Coast from the 1880s, rejected that scheme and explained such similarities primarily by

• contact between neighbouring regions and the particular history of each
• a stage of development that each society reached independently at a comparable point in its growth
• the physical environment, which imposes much the same solutions wherever conditions are alike
• an inherited mental endowment shared by all human populations everywhere

Answer: contact between neighbouring regions and the particular history of each

Historical particularism holds that each configuration must be explained by its own history of contact and invention, which is why Boas demanded ethnographic detail before comparison. A single ladder assumes in advance the conclusion that fieldwork was supposed to test.

Ferguson's 1990 study of a large rural development project in Lesotho found that the project failed by its own stated measures: incomes did not rise and the livestock scheme collapsed. His account of what it nevertheless accomplished is that the project

• shifted resources to a neighbouring district whose planners had prepared a more realistic scheme
• succeeded in cultural terms by teaching new agricultural techniques that outlasted the period of funding
• extended state administration into the area while presenting political questions as technical ones
• demonstrated that the population had rejected development and preferred existing arrangements

Answer: extended state administration into the area while presenting political questions as technical ones

The 'anti-politics machine' is not a story about incompetence: the side effect — more bureaucracy, and less that can be argued about politically — is the change that lasted. Reading Ferguson as saying merely that development fails loses the argument.