Meaning is better than structure

[ailiathena]

In trying to write my National Science Foundation grant proposal, I am struggling to formulate my goals in the form of hypotheses that can be disproved. Obviously, this is important to some science-y people. But  Geertz is a social scientist obsessed with interpreting meaning, and he really shaped my approach to anthropology. Interpretation, it

Comments

Re: meaning

[ailiathena]

Yes, I'm definitely coming from a phenomenological perspective, but I don't agree that typological and pattern recognition approaches are my only options. I'm also not sure that I agree with your portrayals of a Sophistic vs. Aristotelian approach, since both of them come from an extremely essentializing perspective that I find extremely problematic. That said, I suspect with your categorizations, you would put me in the pattern recognition frame, although I would not describe myself that way. One of the failures of such approaches, as helpfully clarified by Fredrik Barth, is that "we need a viewpoint that does not confuse the effects of
ecologic circumstances on behaviour with those of cultural tradition, but which makes it possible to separate these factors and investigate the nonecological cultural and social components creating diversity." He's speaking specifically about ethnic groups there, but I think it's more broadly relevant as well. It's where informant's emphasis on one pattern or another become crucial.

When I'm talking about meaning, I'm speaking about interpretive anthropology, a la Clifford Geertz who I'm sure you know is a hero of mine. Although I'm pretty positive you wouldn't approve of his approach, his ideas are about the particularities NOT generalizations - as is pretty inherent in the idea of pattern recognition. This is an approach that makes a great deal of sense to me. The idea is that the generalities are superficial whereas the particularities allow us to move between frames and "communicate" in a broad sense.

That's what I hope to do with my work.