Azande observe the action of the poison oracle as we observe it, but their observations are always subordinated to their beliefs and are incorporated into their beliefs and made to explain them and justify them. Let the reader consider any argument that would utterly demolish all Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated into Zande modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief. For their mystical notions are eminently coherent, being interrelated by a network of logical ties, and are so ordered that they never too crudely contradict sensory experience but, instead, experience seems to justify them. (1976 [1937]: 150)
One might now turn the tables and argue that Western theorists, just as rational as the Azande, are equally adept at inventing evidence-proof belief systems based on unexamined and questionable premises. Roy D’Andrade argues, for example, that much of contemporary cultural anthropology produces such models:
What theoretical work there is in [current] cultural anthropology is primarily based on reasoning from assumed first principles—people must be shaped by their symbolic worlds, psychology cannot be relevant to cultural facts, and so on. This makes for . . . much debate, principle-begging arguments, little clarity, and no progress. (2000: 226)
D’Andrade is referring to versions of culturalism that do not let the world talk back. If on first principles culture determines our ideas and actions, then our ideas and actions can only be evidence of culture’s agency. If representations axiomatically form or condense our thoughts and feelings, then why look any further than representations to infer what those thoughts and feelings are? Anthropologists’ proclivity for using the language of psychology to characterize symbols and discourses, treating them as if they were subjective phenomena, promotes such circularity. Hence we are often told, on the basis of an interpretation that makes no reference to any living person, that American films or magazines or television shows embody or transmit aggression or prurience or egoism or what-have-you—as if dispositions and desires resided in or were conveyed by inanimate representations!5
I do not think anthropology will prosper as a serious intellectual enterprise if it gets into the business of concocting closed belief systems. This practice leads either to camps of true believers or to epithets shouted, but rarely heard, across chasms of incomprehension. Nevertheless, every theory, however open to contrary evidence, requires provisional commitments to foundational assumptions.
Assumptions can be more or less crude, more or less plausible, more or less productive of insight and explanation. So let us begin at square one, with an examination and evaluation of the basic elements of standard social scientific theory.
Back to Square One
In principle the human cosmos can be modeled in an infinite number of ways. But all ways are not equal. One starts by making some judicious elemental distinctions—judicious, not arbitrary, because our aim is to produce not a geometry, but a model. A primordial cut endemic to human theories, and one that I will strongly defend, is the division between two realms we might call public and personal. But the way this cut is made—what objects get assigned to which sphere, how those objects are characterized, and how relations among them are defined—has far-reaching implications for the construction of models in all of the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, and history). My aim is not to criticize the conceptual division between public and personal, but rather certain versions of it that seem to me injudicious.
Here I focus on sociology and anthropology, twin disciplines with deep shared roots. Examination of their origins reveals an asymmetry in the cut: a hypertrophy of the public and, correspondingly, an attenuation of the personal.6 The skew originates in the work of a common ancestor, Emile Durkheim, who provided axioms that have warranted a family of social science models in which public facts reign supreme. In that Durkheimian family, as distant offspring, I include currently influential anthropological models that feature cultural interpretation and discourse analysis. I argue that their refusal to build personal phenomena into their foundations—a refusal that is the trademark move of culturalism—stunts our understanding of the human cosmos.
“Society” Versus “the Individual”
Standard social science—that is, theory in the Durkheimian lineage— makes a distinction between public and personal that ultimately marginalizes or excludes the personal from its contemplation. Stripped to its essentials, the theory goes like this. “Society,” social science’s rightful object, is counterposed to “the individual,” which is assigned to psychology and romantic philosophy. The business of social science is “social facts” (Durkheim 1964 [1895]), aggregate and emergent collective phenomena. Cognitive faculties, psychodynamic defense mechanisms, features of consciousness, biographical particularities, and biological processes are therefore bracketed. They are denied the status of social facts or else they are regarded obliquely, as collective representations or constructions. Biology and psychology are thus disregarded or, in the more extreme versions of such theory, epistemologically nullified. Although they sometimes pay lip service to the importance of studying “the individual,” many social scientists consider flesh-and-blood persons to be of minor importance in human affairs, or, again, treat them as either exemplary of or epiphenomenal to the social. At best, then, Durkheimian social science establishes a cordon sanitaire between social and psychological disciplines; at worst, it smugly assumes that it is grappling with the stuff that counts, while the psychologists—practitioners of an ersatz discipline?—chase after trivia or the mirage of human nature.
In a well-known introduction to sociology, Peter Berger gets to the heart of the Durkheimian view:
If we follow the Durkheimian conception, then, society confronts us as an objective facticity. It is there, something that cannot be denied and must be reckoned with. Society is external to ourselves. It surrounds us, encompasses our life on all sides. We are in society, located in specific sectors of the social system. This location predetermines and predefines almost everything we do, from language to etiquette, from the religious beliefs we hold to the probability that we will commit suicide. . . . Society, as objective and external fact, confronts us especially in the form of coercion. Its institutions pattern our actions and shape our expectations. . . . If we step out of these assignments, society has at its disposal an almost infinite variety of controlling and coercing agencies. . . . Finally, we are located in society not only in space but in time. Our society is a historical entity that extends temporally beyond any individual biography. . . . It was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through history. In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment in history. (1963: 91–92)
In this theoretical universe, “culture”—that is to say, society’s meaningful aspect—is an ideational prison with walls so high that the prisoners (all of us, save perhaps the anthropologists themselves) mistake them for the boundaries of the world.
It is true that Clifford Geertz, the towering figure in interpretive anthropology, emphasizes his Weberian (rather than Durkheimian) treatment of culture. Weber emphasized, as does