Anthropological thinking: the big anthropological questions practice questions.

In a Malaysian rice-farming village studied by Scott between 1978 and 1980, poorer households faced with mechanised harvesting mounted no open protest; they dragged their feet, pilfered, avoided work for particular landlords and circulated damaging gossip. Scott's material is used to address which anthropological question?

• Whether societies without written records can be compared with those that keep them
• Why ritual is so often the setting in which a change of social status is publicly marked
• How people act upon their situation when open confrontation would be too costly to risk
• Whether a community's account of its own past is a historical record

Answer: How people act upon their situation when open confrontation would be too costly to risk

Scott's answer to the structure and agency question is that agency need not be dramatic: routine, deniable acts are what remains available when the balance of force makes confrontation ruinous. Reading such acts as mere disorder misses their pattern.

In 1947 the executive board of the American Anthropological Association submitted a statement to the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights arguing that standards drawn from one cultural tradition should not be imposed on others; in 1999 the same association adopted a declaration committing anthropologists to work on human rights. The shift illustrates a continuing argument about

• whether ethnographic fieldwork ought to be funded by governments or by universities
• whether anthropology belongs among the sciences or among the humanities as a discipline
• whether an ethnographer must learn the language of the community studied
• whether any standard at all can be defended across the boundaries between communities

Answer: whether any standard at all can be defended across the boundaries between communities

Methodological relativism, suspending judgement in order to understand, does not by itself settle whether cross-cultural standards can be defended, and the discipline has argued both sides. Treating relativism as approval of every practice is the usual short circuit.

Ethnographic records show that every society so far documented prohibits sexual relations between some categories of kin, yet the categories differ: cousins who may not marry in one setting are the preferred spouses in another. A universal prohibition combined with variable categories poses which comparative question?

• why some societies have preserved a prohibition that other societies gradually abandoned
• how a regularity found everywhere can take such different social forms from one society to the next
• whether kinship is worth studying at all, given how widely its categories vary
• how the prohibition can be explained by the biological consequences of reproduction between close kin

Answer: how a regularity found everywhere can take such different social forms from one society to the next

A prohibition found in every society invites a universal explanation, yet the variation in which kin it covers shows that the categories are set socially, so the question is how one regularity takes many social forms. A biological explanation speaks to the prohibition but not to the varying categories, and it cannot account for prohibitions on people related by adoption or shared naming rather than by close genetic ties.

Sahlins argued in 1972, drawing on Lee's time records among Ju/'hoansi camps in the Kalahari and on comparable material elsewhere, that foraging peoples had been misdescribed as living permanently on the edge of starvation. His claim, which he put as the 'original affluent society', was that

• foraging peoples owned a greater quantity of goods than the farming societies that succeeded them
• the Ju/'hoansi were an exception among foragers and cannot be used for any general argument
• affluence can be reached by wanting little, so modest wants and short working hours meet the definition
• the shortage reported by earlier writers had been invented and no foraging population has ever gone hungry

Answer: affluence can be reached by wanting little, so modest wants and short working hours meet the definition

The argument works by redefining affluence as a ratio of means to wants rather than as a quantity of goods. Later work has qualified the figures and stressed seasonal hardship, but the point about the assumption smuggled into the word scarcity has held.

Descola, drawing on his fieldwork among the Achuar of Amazonia and on a wide comparison, argued that the division between nature and culture that European thought treats as self-evident is one scheme among several for sorting humans, animals, plants and spirits. The consequence he draws for anthropology is that

• the societies he compares are simply mistaken about the boundary between people and animals
• a question such as 'how does this society view nature' presupposes a division that not every scheme makes
• anthropologists should stop comparing societies, since their schemes have nothing whatever in common
• the division is universal after all, and the apparent variation is only a matter of different vocabulary being used for the same underlying scheme

Answer: a question such as 'how does this society view nature' presupposes a division that not every scheme makes

The point is about the form of the question. If a scheme distributes interiority and physicality differently, asking how it represents nature builds the answer into the question — which is why Descola sets out four schemes rather than ranking societies by their accuracy about one.

The same custom can be explained in more than one way. Harris accounted for the protection of cattle in India by the work the animals do — traction, dung for fuel and fertiliser, milk — and argued that a ban on slaughter preserves a resource that hunger would otherwise destroy. Douglas would instead ask what classification the animal occupies and what its treatment upholds. Setting the two side by side shows that

• one of the two explanations must be false, since a custom can have only a single cause
• explanations of custom cannot be assessed at all and the choice between them is a matter of taste
• the choice between kinds of explanation is a theoretical commitment that the analyst has to state and defend
• material explanations should always be preferred, because the quantities involved can be measured and compared directly

Answer: the choice between kinds of explanation is a theoretical commitment that the analyst has to state and defend

The two answers are to different questions — what does the practice do materially, and what does it mean within a classification — and each generates its own evidence. Recognising that is the first step in any evaluation of a theoretical school.