Author: tompepinsky

Following up on posts here and here on methodology in Southeast Asian studies, let me collect and respond to some of the very interesting reactions that I’ve received here and elsewhere.

Sam says

 it may have been interesting to have thematic panels consisting of individual presenters from different disciplines rather than dividing the panels by discipline

My response: Agreed! It would also have been fascinating to hear more about Sam’s own research.

Elvin says

Political scientists and economists are generally students of positivism, whereas fellow academics in anthropology and cultural studies are more rooted in perspectives similar to critical theory or constructivism (Peter Winch and Michel Foucault come to mind). Thus, in positivism, academics may be more open to utilizing a plurality of methods to get at an explanation of a particular phenomenon. In contrast, constructivists or critical theorists are more interested in descriptions of power dynamics and understanding the world as it is.

My response: I think that’s right. What I find puzzling, though, is why there is less direct confrontation from the critical theorists’ perspective of the positivists. I would imagine that both sides would be interested in discussing why they do things the way they do, but I only see engagement from one side. Curious.

Now for some non-blog comments. S says

as political science and economics expand their gaze to new areas and feel more confident about their work, they generate push-back, most of which is emotional rather than really intellectual. Intellectual (and constructive) resistance to social sciency imperialism tends to come more from within social science rather than outside, with exceptions of course.

My response: this may be true, but what strikes me so is the lack of any pushback, even emotional pushback, from the non-political science crowd. I would have liked to see emotional pushback; what I saw was eyes cast down at the papers.

U says

I’m struck by the contrast between South and Southeast Asian area studies. In S[outh] Asia, the usual complaint is that poli sci and postmodern anthro folks are not interested in empirical details due to their theoretical pre-commitments.

My response: Very interesting observation. The distinction here is less between positivist and postmodern than it is between “soak and poke first” and “ensure that the natives confirm your preconceptions or your theory.” I wonder if there are good interdisciplinary debates in South Asian studies. I bet there are.

P says

I think the basic issue is that the two schools have different and mutually incompatible ontological and epistemological assumptions…Almost everyone in the social science group adheres to some kind of realism: the world exists and our debates concern how best to show how it works. To someone with a pure “idealist” ontology all such debates are about as useful as debating the true temperature of hell.

My response: Very well put and I think that this is consonant with what I’m thinking here. But still I think we need to ask why the positivist SE Asianists want engagement with the non-positivists, while the non-positivists seem either uninterested or unwilling to go the other way.

C says

you’re conflating the humanities writ large with a particular way of doing anthropology…it’s simply a question of being interested in answering very different questions. In other words, the disagreement is not over how you answer a particular question, but why you are asking it in the first place. I also think that much of this is about the perceived value of making comparisons, which is fundamental to much of the social sciences but marginal at best (if not deeply distrusted) in many humanities disciplines.

My response: I agree with almost all of this. I run the risk of painting all of the humanistic social sciences as being postmodern, and I know that’s not right: lots of historians, both in the glory days of SEA studies and today, act more in the manner that the harder social scientists do today. George Kahin is a great example. Maybe C is too. I also recognize the suspicion of comparison, although I do not think that it holds much weight as an organizing principle for Southeast Asian politics. What remains unexplained, though, is why—given disagreement about what makes a good question—we don’t see more engagement from all camps about the value of the question. There’s more going on here, I think, if we want to explain the asymmetries I’ve described.

In my previous post, I wrote about a peculiar asymmetry that I observed between the harder social sciences and the humanistic social sciences at a conference on methodology in Southeast Asia. The political scientists and economists, on the whole, were quite willing to engage critically with the anthropologists and cultural/ethnic/global studies folks. The same is not true in reverse: despite my best efforts to start a debate with the traditional area studies crowd, it just seemed to stall.

Asking Questions, Being Critical, Feeling the Flow

I entertained five possibilities for why this might have been the case: representatives from the harder social sciences are (1) numerate, (2) obviously wrong, (3) American, (4) male, or (5) jerks. I’m not dismissing any of these out of hand, but my suspicion is that it lies in something else, more fundamental to the disciplines. (Hearing from both political scientists and non political scientists that my experience talking about Southeast Asian studies in Freiburg is not unique to either SEA or Freiburg only reinforces this suspicion.)

I think the difference has to do with disciplinary norms about fallibility in social research.

By fallibility, I just mean the fact that the findings can be wrong and that it’s often hard to tell. There’s nothing unique to social research in this regard, of course. But some scholars of society seem to be uniquely distressed by the possibility that we could be wrong. It’s not just that we’re bad researchers, but also somehow bad people too. (It’s this sort of idea that generates the triumphalist pronunciation that someone’s research is “reductionist” or “hegemonic” or “Orientalist,” which take on the tone of personal insults.)

My claim is that there are two different ways in which social scientists address the fallibility of their own research.

1. The first is the standard normal science way: trying one’s best to make all research procedures clear, objective, and replicable. (Many historians, incidentally, fall into this camp.) It involves an understanding that the point of the audience is to ensure that the presenter is not pulling a fast one. Your audience should be able to ask you questions about your research, and you should be able to answer them. The message here is “look, if you did this research yourself you’d come up with the same results too.”
2. The second is the approach embraced in most of cultural anthropology and many of the thematic studies corners of Southeast Asian studies. In essence, it is to redefine the enterprise of social research in such a way as to make fallibility irrelevant. Rather than representing the social world as it is, or presenting a framework for organizing observations about the world, the task is to reflect upon the meanings (overt or hidden) that make the task of social research difficult. The message here is “look, you can’t do this research. And honestly, I’m not sure that I can either. So let’s forget about truth or accuracy. There’s no point trying to nail down the objective facts here. Here’s what I felt.”

This matters, in turn, because the norm of how you think about the fallibility of your own research shapes how you engage with the potential fallibility of other people’s research. When a political scientist presents a scatterplot, s/he is already thinking about how to face questions about its meaning. In turn, when s/he sees someone else’s research, the thought is “how do I know that this is right?” Same thing when an economist hears a cultural studies presentation which claims to represent, say, what popular culture is like in Vietnam. The instinct is to immediately think something like, “well, how do I know that this is correct? How did we get a representative sample? What does popular culture mean? How does it vary?” In short, for the harder social sciences, we think that our job as an audience is to knock the presentation around to see if it holds up.

Not so, I think, with the humanistic social sciences. If you start with the position that you yourself are incapable of faithfully recording or interpreting the social world as it “really is” then you have no reason to believe that anyone else can either. When witnessing an economist present corruption data, I can only imagine what a critical theorist thinks. There is really no ground for interaction, because the entire enterprise of believing that one says true things about the world is a mistake. It’s a best a peculiar thing that economists do.

One comment made by a political scientist at the end of the conference really nails this. (Sorry, no names here, but it wasn’t me.) He said, “what I’d really like is a guidebook that tells me what counts as good anthropological research in Southeast Asia. I’m not an anthropologist, so how do I know it when I see it? What standards do you use?” The fact that no one would answer him—and that no one could even point him to a place where anthropologists have been debating the answer—speaks volumes.

I don’t think that it was always this way. I wasn’t around in the1960s and 1970s, but I think that back then the debates across the disciplines in Southeast Asian studies really were more common, and likely more productive, with contributions from both sides. We’ve lost something. If we take interdisciplinarity seriously, which is what we’re supposed to do, we ought to restart the conversation.

So here’s a plea—a cry into the wilderness perhaps, but I make it nonetheless. Can we find a forum for real dialogue across disciplines on methodology in Southeast Asian studies? An AAS panel, a special edition of JSEAS, something like that? I see the wonderful Freiburg conference last week as actually crystallizing for me just how much further we need to go. This will require some representatives of the humanistic social sciences (you know who you are) who are willing to engage directly with the harder social sciences on their own terms. I’ll volunteer to be the representative from mainstream political science. Who’s with me?