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454 F c u r r e n t a n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 4, August–October 2003

cific subject, and we later published the talk in Review (Mintz 1978).2 What he did was to survey the successivelabor processes on Caribbean plantations over severalcenturies and write a thoughtful, reflective article on thelimitations of the traditional ways in which the terms

“slave” and “proletarian” were defined “in isolation”from each other. His response to the actual question wasnonetheless a cautious one.

There are two things to note about this. First of all, Iwas violating a rather strong academic norm. One maysuggest to an invited speaker a thematic area, but it isnot considered appropriate to dictate the specific title.Second, this is not a question one normally poses toanthropologists and even less one that anthropologistshave often posed to themselves. Can you imagine Mal-inowski or Lucy Mair answering it? It was bad enough,they might have thought, that this bizarre Mintz typehad actually believed that studying plantation slaverywas a legitimate task for anthropologists, but to use the

term “proletarian” was surely going too far. It was nota term that one normally found in the canonic texts.Economists (certain economists) might use it; historianstoo, and maybe sociologists. But anthropologists? It im-plied crossing the line between the West and the rest.And if this line seems now to have lost its salience some-what in the anthropological community (but has it re-ally?), that was not yet true in 1977.

My second anecdote is briefer. It concerns Hugh Gus-terson, who teaches anthropology at MIT. In an interviewin the New York Times, Gusterson responds to the ques-tion how he had come to study the folkways and moresof nuclear weapons scientists. He concludes his responseby saying: “In 1984, it was unusual to be doing fieldworkin your own culture. If you did it at all, you studieddown—ghetto residents, welfare mothers. Nowadays,there’s a fast-growing field, the anthropology of science”(Dreifus 2002:21).

My third anecdote concerns a historian. In a review ofa recent book by Richard D. E. Burton on violence inParisian political life between 1789 and 1945, David A.Bell (2002:19) makes the following criticism: “But byposing as an anthropologist—the scientist who stands tothe side taking notes as the natives slaughter eachother—he also falls into a trap that has ensnared manyothers: failing to take seriously the reasons for which hissubjects believed they were fighting and dying.”

It is always revealing, if sometimes disconcerting, toknow how your colleagues in neighboring departmentsview you. I shall not take sides in this internecine snip-ing amongst the social sciences, but clearly Bell is re-ferring to the different tonalities of the cultures of thetwo communities, that of the anthropologists and thatof the historians. I believe the issue of “taking notes asthe natives slaughter each other” has recently been thefocus of a rather passionate debate within the American

2. Mintz inserted an opening footnote: “I am grateful to ProfessorWallerstein for the opportunity to air my views and, indeed, for thechoice of topic to which he asked me to address myself.”

Anthropological Association, one that has managed toseep through into the nonscholarly media.

All of my anecdotes concern disciplines as disciplines.What should they embrace as subject matter? Howshould we approach the subject matter? Do the linesmatter, and, if so, for what and for whom? Let me startby making my basic position clear. I believe that thesocial construction of the disciplines as intellectual are-nas that was made in the 19th century has outlived itsusefulness and is today a major obstacle to serious in-tellectual work. Further, I believe that the institutionalframework of the disciplines remains very strong, al-though there are important crevices in the overall struc-tures of knowledge—crevices that are visible at the mo-ment only to those who look for them—that render thesolidity of these institutions far less certain than mostparticipants imagine. And finally, I believe that there isrichness in each of the disciplinary cultures that shouldbe harvested, stripped of its chaff, and combined (or atleast utilized) in a reconstruction of the social sciences.Let me deal with these three assertions successively.

The Intellectual Justification of theDisciplines

The first chapter of the report of an international com-mission that I chaired, the Gulbenkian Commission onthe Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1996; see alsoWallerstein 1995),3 deals with “the historical construc-tion of the social sciences, from the eighteenth centuryto 1945.” In it we argued that the intellectual lines ofthe surviving disciplines (for one must think of disci-

plinary names as having survived a culling process thatwent on for over a century) hinged around three axes:the past (history) versus the present (economics, politicalscience, and sociology), the West (the previous four) andthe rest (anthropology and Oriental studies), and thestructuring of the nomothetic Western present aroundthe liberal distinction of the market (economics), thestate (political science), and civil society (sociology).

Because this is 2002, you can all see the limitationsof the presumed axes of distinction, and you are wellaware that massive numbers of social scientists havebegun in the past three decades to disregard these linesin the sand. Furthermore, you are aware that many per-sons have sought to modify the intellectual premises of

the various disciplines in order to take these realitiesinto account and to transform what might have beenthought of as academic poaching into legitimate activ-ities. But I can assure you that, when I was a graduatestudent (which is only 50 years ago), these 19th-centuryboundaries were not merely in place but very activelyasserted and defended in all the disciplines.

What happened? Very simple: the world changed. TheUnited States became a hegemonic power with globalresponsibilities. The Third World became a political

3. The anthropologist member of the commission was Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

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w a l l e r s t e i n Dubious Disciplines F 455

force. And there was a massive expansion worldwide ofuniversity education, with a consequent massive in-crease in the number of social scientists doing researchand writing books. The first two changes meant that theseparation into disciplines for the West and disciplinesfor the rest became untenable, and the third change ledto a quest for originality via academic poaching. Thesedays, as you also surely know, the names of the papersat annual meetings of social science associations are ex-tremely similar, except for the addition of the heading“anthropology of” or “sociology of” or “history of” tothe same substantive phrase.

Do these papers given at different disciplinary confer-ences read differently? Up to a point, they do, and thishas to do with the cultures of the disciplines. But theyread less differently than one might think, and certainlya social scientist coming from Mars might wonderwhether the degree of difference was worth the fuss.Therefore I want to play with the following quixotic idea.

Suppose that we merged all the existing social sciencedisciplines into one gigantic new faculty called the “his-torical social sciences.”4 Now, when the fairy godmotherhad left the room and we found that this miracle hadoccurred, we would immediately feel that this structurewas too big and bulky for our own good. Many of us(perhaps most of us) already find the existing depart-ments too diffuse. A merger would compound the prob-lem geometrically. But of course we know what wouldhappen. People would create corners in which they feltcomfortable, and sooner or later we would get new sub-divisions, perhaps new departments. My guess is that, ifthis happened, the new departments would probablyhave quite different names from any we now know. This

is what happened when zoology and botany merged intoa single department of biology somewhere around1945–55. We now have many, many subdepartments orspecialties within biology, but none to my knowledge iscalled botany or zoology.

Let us speculate together on what the lines of intel-lectual division really are in world social science at thepresent time. I think that there exist three main group-ings of scholars. There is clearly a large camp of personswho hold onto the classic nomothetic vision—who wishto construct the most general laws possible about socialbehavior via quasi-experimental designs, using data thatare presumably replicable and on the whole as quanti-tative as possible. They dominate departments of eco-

nomics (in the United States at least, but not only) andalso, increasingly, departments of political science. Theyare strong in departments of sociology and geography.They can be found as well, albeit in smaller numbers,in departments of history and anthropology. These per-sons share a lot of fundamental premises and even meth-odological preferences. For example, methodological in-

4. I would not include psychology in the mix, for two good reasons.First, I think that the level of analysis is quite distinctive. Second,most psychologists would prefer to be called biological scientistsrather than social scientists, and they would be right, in my judg-ment, given the kind of work that they are in fact doing.

dividualism is very popular in this camp. They talk toeach other already, and they might be happier to do thatfull-time.

There is another camp that is in many ways heir tothe idiographic tradition. It favors dissecting the partic-ular and the different. This is not a question of scale;although many of these people greatly prefer to deal withsmall-scale phenomena, some of them are quite willingto venture into dissecting rather large-scale ones. Thepoint is that their backs go up any time one suggestsuniformities. As a result, they are not likely to seek outquantitative data. They don’t all necessarily reject suchdata in every instance—it’s a question of what you dowith them—but they nonetheless use mostly so-calledqualitative data. They favor close, almost textual anal-yses. They empathize with the objects of their study, andthey denounce sympathizing with them because sym-pathy is an expression of power. Almost by definition,they talk to each other primarily about what they dislike

about what people in the other camps do. But when theypresent their own work, they find a lot of resistance evenin their own camp. They are a quarrelsome bunch. Still,surrounded by nomothetists, they might wish to escapeinto their own organizational universe. These people areprimarily to be found in departments of anthropologyand history and to an increasing extent in sociology.There are in addition some political scientists, some ge-ographers, and even a few economists to add to theaggregation.

And then there are people who feel comfortable inneither of these camps. These are the people who do notdeny that they wish to construct grand narratives in or-der to deal with what they think of as complex social

phenomena. Quite the contrary; they are proud of it. Interms of data, they are catholic in their tastes, usingquantitative or qualitative data as they find them avail-able and plausible. In the construction of these grandnarratives, however empirical they are in their practiceand their preferences, they abut on larger philosophicalquestions, and some of them are quite willing to enterinto dialogue with those who technically define them-selves as philosophers. They also abut on large politicalquestions, and some of them enter into dialogue withthose political scientists who call themselves specialistsin international relations. This group is found all overthe place—in history, in sociology, in anthropology, ingeography, in economics (especially of course economichistory), and in political science—but always as a mi-nority. They too talk to each other already, perhaps evenmore than members of the other groups—this being areflex, perhaps, of their belief that they are a persecutedminority.

I would guess that social scientists, left to themselvesin a remolded faculty of historical social sciences, mightwell create three such “disciplines” as intellectual con-structs. And I suspect that such a configuration wouldbe an enormous improvement over anything we havenow or have had in the past. But will they be left tothemselves?

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do so because they think this will enhance their lifechances, and quite often governments and entrepreneursare happy to see them not enter the workforce yet, giventhe comparative surfeit of older workers. More studentsand less money equals chronic crisis. We have all beenliving through that, and I see no reason to expect thiseconomic constraint to go away. True, we may have an-other A-phase, but we shall also see the further expan-sion of the world university system. For one thing,peopleare living longer and therefore working longer, and theauthorities of the world-system will try even harder tokeep young people out of the job market. Keeping themin the university system is a genuine social solution butan expensive one.

If I were a university administrator, I would lookaround to see if I could tighten the ship. One way wouldbe to get professors to teach more to more students. Thisis what I call the “high-school-ization” of the universi-ties, and it is going on apace. This of course makes someof the most prestigious professors seek to escape intopermanent research institutions or even corporate re-search structures. From the point of view of the admin-istrators, this is a prestige loss but a financial gain; theyget rid of some of their most expensive professors. An-other way would be to merge departments. Why not?They overlap. They don’t teach enough. Students areconfused by the present situation. A new departmentwith a snazzy title might attract students and at the sametime achieve economies of scale. I could even tout it asintellectual audacity. So when I say that the extremelystrong organizational structure of the disciplines hascracks that are too little noticed, it is the potential in-trusion of the administrators that I have primarily inmind.

Who knows? The administrators might do a wonderfuljob of reorganization. I have two fears, however. One isthat they will be driven more by budgetary concerns thanby purely intellectual ones. After all, administrators arepaid not to determine the best way of defining the tasksof scholars but to find good people to be professors andtherewith to create a socially useful product. The so-called best universities might be willing to sustain small,unpopular groupings that have some purely long-termintellectual justification, but there will never be manyjobs for those who wish to teach Akkadian language andculture. And reconstructions that are driven by budg-etary analyses will too often be following the fads of the

moment or the poorly defined needs of the students’ pro-spective employers.The second concern that I have is that administrator-

generated reconstructions will be done differently ineach locality. Local situations are of course always veryspecific, and administrators do not have as strong astransnational organizational structure as scholars in theseparate disciplines. The result could be, on a worldscale, quite diffuse and militate against the emergenceof the kinds of institutions that would facilitate themaintenance of world communities of scholars.

This all may well be unfair to administrators, since (asI am arguing) the scholar-teachers are not primed to do

such a marvelous job themselves. The point is that weare heading into an era of chaos in the structures of thedisciplines and, while I believe that order always emergesout of chaos (to echo Prigogine), the outcome is intrin-sically uncertain (to take up another theme of Prigogine).We will not navigate this era well if we do not keep asharp eye on what is actually happening.

Harvesting the Cultures of Social Science

Here I enter the most treacherous terrain. “Harvesting”is an agricultural metaphor, referring to various productsof the soil that can be combined and transformed intouseful products—food, clothing, and everything else weneed in everyday life—and that may be better or less goodproducts according to how well we perform the opera-tions, within the constraints imposed by the conditionsof the soil. Perhaps we ought rather to phrase the pro-cesses in terms of a different metaphor, that of thepainter mixing his colors in order to produce a work ofart on a canvas. I could then list for you my favoritecolors and the combinations that I thought to be inter-esting or beautiful and then design my picture in thestyle I thought most meaningful to me, to you. The met-aphor of the painter seems to give more autonomy tothe subject—constrained, no doubt, but less constrainedperhaps than the farmer by external realities over whichhe has no or little control. I do not want to get lost inmetaphors but merely to indicate my uncertainty on thisperennial issue of how much to emphasize agency oreven how much agency is a real issue in analyzing thefuture of social science.

What I shall do therefore is to pick a series of culturalprejudices that I think work better than their alternativesand that I hope will serve as the foundation stones ofthe putatively reconstructed arena I am calling the his-torical social sciences. Let us start with the very nameI am using for this new disciplinary construct. We can-not, I believe, talk about the real world in any way thatis not based on a claim to science, by which I mean theassumption that the world is real and is potentiallyknowable (if only perhaps in part). Every word we use inspeaking and writing involves a theory and a grand nar-rative. There is no way to escape this, however muchwe try or claim to do so. At the same time, there is noway to analyze or even describe the real world without

being historical, by which I mean that the context of anygiven reality is constantly changing, evolving, and thatstatements of truth are no longer true the moment afterthey are uttered. The problem of social science (and prob-ably of the natural sciences as well) is how to reconcilethe search for structural continuities (laws or hypothe-ses, if you like) and constant historical change. In otherwords, the problem is to find modes of analysis or lan-guages that can bridge this inherent contradiction of theprocess of knowing.

Stating the issue in this manner is a way of denyingthe usefulness of the Methodenstreit, of rejecting theclaims of both nomothetists and idiographers, of saying

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that we are all condemned to be both simultaneously atall times and under all circumstances. Many, even mostpresent-day social scientists will probably feel quite un-comfortable about this reality, for it violates the cultureswithin which they have been socialized. But we knowthat cultures can and do change—that they are mallea-ble, if sometimes with difficulty. And I can hope that by2052, at the 59th Sidney W. Mintz Lecture in Anthro-pology (although this last term may not survive thetransformations), this Aufhebung will seem so naturalthat it will not even be thought necessary to advert toit.

In such a culture, what kind of work shall we be doing?Empirical work, largely, I hope, but of a certain kind. Letme start with what I think is social science’s most per-vasive failing: Much of what we do is an elaborate ex-planation of some dependent variable without any realempirical demonstration that the explicandum is in anysense real. It is all too easy to assume that a credibleproposition is a reality. It is against this that Ranke in-sisted that history must concern itself only with wie eseigentlich gewesen ist. Paul Lazarsfeld (1949) long agodemonstrated that obvious facts are not so obvious onceone actually tries to provide evidence for them, and theearly ethnographers wrestled with imageries of strange,assertedly savage behavior that seemed to be quite dif-ferent when seen close at hand. Ranke used his warningto argue that we must search for archival evidence. La-zarsfeld used his to argue the utility of public-opinionpolling. The ethnographers used theirs to insist on par-ticipant observation. The solutions, it turned out, weremany, all no doubt with their limitations. It is the rec-ognition of the problem that is crucial.

Without a statement about a dependent variable thathas been reasonably demonstrated empirically, there canbe no analysis. This does not mean that the assertion iscorrect. There can never be a definitive fact of any kind.But between the definitive fact and the presumed butundemonstrated reality lies a wide range of possibilities,and it is in this murky middle ground—the world of whathas probably really happened in the world—that the his-torical social sciences are called upon to work. Deductivemodels serve us ill. Common knowledge is at best asource of possibly correct perceptions and itself an objectof study. This is why fieldwork (in the loosest, broadestsense of the term) is our eternal responsibility. Once wehave something to explain, we need concepts, variables,

and methods with which to explain it. And it is aboutconcepts, variables, and methods that we have long beenarguing with each other—arguing loudly and on thewhole not very fruitfully.

We all use concepts, and we all have a bag of conceptsin our mind, ones that we have learned in our continuingeducation from childhood on. Some of them are as mun-dane as “needs” and “interests,” some as seemingly ob-vious as “society” and “culture,” some as seemingly spe-cific and “advanced” as “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat.”They are all challenged by some people sometimes, butthis doesn’t stop others from invoking them. Thereforeit is good to remember the admonition of Lucien Febvre

(1962:481), writing about the concept of “civilization,”that “it is never a waste of time to write the history ofa word.” This elementary truth, largely ignored, is whatthose devoted to deconstruction have tried to reinvent.We now have a whole Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte inGermany of which I would guess most social scientistsare unaware.

Nor do most social scientists pay attention to the con-straints of morphology. Listing multiple varieties ofsome phenomenon tends to be a sort of mindless em-piricism. Morphologies are ways of creating preliminaryorder in the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of reality andin effect are hidden causal hypotheses. They tend to beworthless when there are too many categories; usually,three or four are the limit. This suggests that what socialscientists need to do is to examine carefully and debatetheir philosophical, epistemological premises. They donot currently consider Begriffsgeschichte or the modesof constructing morphologies as a foundation stone oftheir own research or as a necessary part of graduateeducation. Here is where their scientism leads to dis-tinctly unscientific outcomes, without even the aware-ness that this is happening.

As we move from concepts to variables, once againsome simple truths are in order. To continue my met-aphor, the prejudices of a minority need to be incorpo-rated into the practice of all of us. First, virtually allstatements should be made in the past tense. To makethem in the present tense is to presume universality andeternal reality. The argument should not be made bygrammatical sleight-of-hand. Anything that happenedyesterday is in the past. Generalizations about what hap-pened yesterday are about the past. This is perhaps asensitive issue for some anthropologists (the famous“ethnographic present”) and most mainstream econo-mists and sociologists, but using the past tense servesas a constant reminder of the historicity of our analysesand the necessity for theoretical prudence.

I wish also to make a case for a culture of plurals. Mostconcepts are plural concepts—civilizations, cultures,economies, families, structures of knowledge, and so on.It is not that we cannot proffer a definition for a wordand insist that what doesn’t meet that definition shouldnot be described by that term. But, as we know only toowell, almost all conceptual terms are defined in multipleways, and it is not very helpful to scholarly debate toassume away the debate by deduction from one’s defi-

nition. Yet much of what we currently do is done in thisway, and we are even rewarded for doing it and quiteoften penalized for not doing it. Failure to insist on anarrow definition is often pilloried as journalism, eclec-ticism, or deviation from the truth.

And along with the past tense and plurals comes theculture of multiple temporalities, multiple spatialities,and multiple TimeSpaces. The Methodenstreit that hasgoverned most social science since the late 19th centuryhas polarized our community into a battlegroundwherein we were all adjured to choose one side becausethe other side was false, or irrelevant, or worse. Not onlywas this forced conflict counterproductive but it led us

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to ignore the existence and importance of other tem-poralities and spatialities, including Braudel’s longue du-

rée, the necessary concept if reality is at once systemicand historical. What we need in our historical social sci-ence is to consider what our reality looks like withineach of its possible temporalities and spatialities. Andthis is of course necessary whether we are analyzing amacrotopic such as the history of the modern world-system or a microtopic such as the introduction of somenew element into the life stream of some remote village.

Whatever our object of investigation, we need a greatdeal more fluidity in our analyses as we move from onearena to another, from what we like to call the economyto what we like to call the polity to what we like to callthe society or the culture. There is no ceteris paribus,for the other things are never equal. We may wish toignore for a moment elements other than the immediatevariables we are considering, since we may find it dif-ficult to talk about everything at once. But we can neverdo this on the assumption that the surrounding variablesdo not impinge immediately on what we are studying.The whole lesson of the sciences of complexity is thatif one changes the initial conditions ever so minutelythe outcome may be radically different, whatever thetruth of the equations we are using.

This then leads us to the question of methods and ofmethodologies. In my own education, I was taught thatthere was a radical distinction between what were calledin the jargon of my teachers “small-m methods” and“big-m methods.” Small-m methods were all those prac-tical techniques that we use and that in the past wereused to define disciplines: simulation, opinion polling,archival research, participant observation, and so on. Theonly attitude one can take to small-m methods is one ofcomplete catholicity. They are simply methods of esti-mating, capturing reality. They are worth what they areworth in facing up to the ways in which the world makesit difficult for researchers to find out anything about theissues in which they are interested. Not only are noneof these methods intrinsically better than others but nogenerally described research issue or site is necessarilyand permanently linked with any one of them. We allneed them all. They all have their virtues and their lim-itations. And graduate students would do well to becomeacquainted with the widest range of these small-m meth-ods. Since I have been discussing them within the frame-work of cultural prejudices, I call for setting aside our

prejudices. We will be the stronger for it.But the real question is big-m methods. For example,should we trust only quantitative or only qualitativedata? Here it is not a question of simply being eclecticbut one of deciding what kind of data is valid. I havesome simple rules that seem to me to cull our collectivewisdom. It is clear that almost all our statements arequantitative, even when the statements use nothingmore than “more” or “important” in their formulations.And it seems to me that it is always more interesting tobe quantitatively more than less exact. It follows, then,that quantification is desirable whenever it is possible.But that “whenever” encompasses a big caveat. If one

makes serious quantification an imperative and a pri-ority, one risks ending up where the old joke sent us,looking for the lost watch under the lamppost becausethe light is better there.

But there is more to it than that. We have today aleading mathematician warning us that “the qualitativeapproach is not a mere stand-in for quantitativemethods.It may lead to great theoretical advances, as in fluid dy-namics. It has a significant advantage over quantitativemethods, namely, stability” (Ekeland 1988:73). This goesagainst one of the main social-science arguments forquantification, that of reliability (or stability). And thishas to do with what I would call premature quantifica-tion. We can only usefully quantify when we are fairlywell advanced in the plausibility of our models and thestrength of our data. Quantification comes in toward theend of a process, not at the beginning. Indeed, the be-ginning is preeminently the realm of ethnography andother nonquantitative modes of analysis. These tech-niques enable us, in a complex situation (and all socialsituations are complex situations), to tease out the issuesand then explore the explanatory connections.

It is qualitative data, not quantitative data, that aresimple. Simplicity, however, is not the goal of the sci-entific process but the starting point. Of course, one canstart with simple statistical correlations as well. Com-plexification is the name of the game, and ever morecomplex is not necessarily ever more narrative. It mayquite well be—and may even better be—more compli-cated equations, bringing in more and more variables ina controlled fashion.

It is only at this point of relative complexity that wecan engage in real comparisons, ones that do not combinethe investigated situation of the strange or complicatedor exotic with the presumed truth of the situation wethink we know well. Arnold Feldman, one of the earlysociologists who studied what were in his time called“underdeveloped countries,” used to say that, wheneverhe gave a talk on the patterns he discerned in his work,there was sure to be someone in the audience who wouldrise and say, “but not in Pago Pago.” It may or may nothave been true that what Feldman had recounted wasnot true in Pago Pago, but what is the relevance of thiscaution? The critic may have intended to deny the pos-sibility that patterns exist or can ever exist. But thenwhy study Pago Pago? Is it butterfly collecting? Or thecritic may have intended to say that Feldman’s formulae

were too simple and needed further complexification ifthey were to be useful. Or perhaps the critic merely feltthat the organizers should have invited him to lecturerather than Feldman. Criticism is a crucial tool in thehistorical social sciences, but mindless criticism is not.

And that brings me to narratives. Narratives are anadmirably understandable and attractive way of com-municating perceptions of reality. To be sure, even theharshest set of differential equations is a form of nar-rative, though not the most palatable form. Recentlythere has been much attacking of macronarratives. I sup-pose these critics think that what they produce is mi-cronarratives and micro is better than macro. But of

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course the micro is a setting in which the macro man-ifests itself and one that can never be understood withoutreference to the macrosetting. There are in the end nonarratives that are not macronarratives. The only ques-tion we have before us is whether the macronarrativewe are putting forward is defensible.

The culture of the historical social sciences that I en-visage will not be against theorizing or theories, but itwill be cautious about premature closures. Indeed, thebreadth of its data, of its methods, of its linkages to therest of the world of knowledge will be its principal char-acteristic. Vigorous analysis in a climate of tolerant andskeptical debate will be what will aid it most. Of course,I am also assuming that in the next 50 years we shall beovercoming the relatively recent (only two centuries old)but deeply rooted divorce between philosophy and sci-ence—the so-called two cultures—and setting out on thepath of constructing a singular epistemology for allknowledge. In this scenario, a reinvigorated social sci-ence, one that is both structural and historical, can pro-vide the crucial link between the domains we classifyas the natural sciences and those we classify as thehumanities.

The adventure of the historical social sciences is stillin its infancy. The possibilities of enabling us to makesubstantively rational choices in an intrinsically uncer-tain world lie before us and give us cause for hope amidstwhat are now the gloomy times of a historical transitionfrom our world-system to the next one—a transition thatis necessarily occurring in the structures of knowledgeas well. Let us at least try seriously to mend our collec-tive ways and to search for more useful paths. Let usmake our disciplines less dubious.

Comments

s y e d f a r i d a l a t a sDepartment of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260 ([email protected]). 18 iv 03

Wallerstein’s assessment of the current state of the socialsciences and his call for their reconstruction in terms ofwhat he calls the historical social sciences would find

widespread acceptance among many social scientistsaround the world. Here I would like to highlight howthe assessment of the dubious nature of the social sci-ences and the prospects for reconstruction depend onone’s position in the global division of labour in the so-cial sciences.

As Wallerstein puts it, the problem of the social sci-ences is the reconciliation of the search for structuralcontinuities with continuous historical change. Thiswould require rejecting the claims of both the nomo-theticists and the idiographers concerning the under-standing of concepts, variables, and methods in the socialsciences. But this is not the only reconciliation that is

needed. There is the need to reconcile the cultural spec-ificity of concepts with the self-understanding of the peo-ples being studied. There is something of a cultural di-vide in the social sciences that can be seen in the veryconcepts employed by the various disciplines. The na-ture of this cultural divide is as follows: Many conceptsin the social sciences originate from a Greco-Roman,Latin Christian, and European tradition. This does notpose a problem, as Wallerstein recognizes, if these con-cepts become universal or plural. A great many conceptsare, however, passed off as universal when in fact theyderive their characteristics from a particular cultural tra-dition. This wreaks havoc on our understanding of socialphenomena. For example, while “religion” is presentedas a universal concept, the understanding of what makesup religion in phenomenological, historical, and socio-logical terms is often derived from Christianity, resultingin what Joachim Matthes (2000:98), referring to Islam,calls the “ ‘hidden’ cultural Christianisation” of theMuslim world since it started to think of Islam as a“religion.” This raises the interesting question of theextent to which “religions” such as Buddhism, Hindu-ism, and Islam have been intellectually reconstructedafter the image of Christianity because of the conceptsemployed by the disciplines that study religions. Suchconcepts include “church,” “sect,” “denomination,”“secularization,” and “religion” itself. A case in point isa table presenting statistics on church membership inthe United Kingdom in Anthony Giddens’s Sociology (2001:549, table 17.3). However, the religions includedare not just Christianity but Hinduism, Islam, Judaism,Sikhism, and others, giving the impression that the tem-ple, mosque, and synagogue are all, sociologically speak-ing, “churches.” The term “church” is generalized with-out the concept’s being rendered universal or plural.What should be considered is the possibility of otherconcepts of religious organization that can be derivedfrom these other belief systems. As long as the study ofreligion does not look at its objects as potential sourcesof concepts rather than just data, it will remain back-ward, playing down the objects’ conceptualization ofthemselves and denying the culturally plural origins ofideas in the social sciences.

I agree with Wallerstein’s case for a culture of pluralconcepts but would insist that the acculturation of con-cepts be made one of the major concerns of any effort toreconstruct the social sciences. In many parts of the

world collectively termed “the Third World,” “theSouth,” or “developing societies,” social science prac-titioners and institutions are highly dependent on theircounterparts in the United States, Britain, France, and afew other nations for ideas, theories, and concepts, tech-nologies of education, and aid and investment in edu-cation. This state of what we might call academic de-pendency is perpetuated by certain features of the globaldivision of labour in the social sciences: the divisionbetween theoretical and empirical intellectual labour,the division between other-country studies and own-country studies, and the division between comparativeand single-case studies. As long as academics in the

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South continue to do predominantly empirical work thatis largely confined to single cases in their own countriesor localities and therefore lacks a comparative perspec-tive, the prospects for theoretical or conceptual inno-vation are bleak. Even if the social sciences were to bereconfigured as historical social sciences and to extricatethemselves from petty squabbles between the nomo-theticists and idiographers, the global division of labouras I have described it would remain intact and culturallyplural concepts and theories would remain the excep-tion. Therefore, the reconstruction of the social sciencesmust simultaneously be the dismantling of the currentglobal division of labour in the social sciences.

c h r i s t o p h b r u m a n nInstitut für Völkerkunde, Universität zu Köln, 50923Köln, Germany ([email protected]).17 iv 03

By and large, I support Wallerstein’s agenda. A numberof the exhortations are very general, and I would haveto see “multiple temporalities and spatialities” and the“plurality of concepts” specified, but most otherpoints—the importance of empirical backing, the valueof using the past tense, the need for “small-m” methodsemployed in nonideological ways, the dangers of pre-mature quantification, and the virtues of maximal quan-tification—are commendable. The question, however, iswhether these points benefit from a merger of the socialsciences. Surely we will all profit from tearing down thefences that hinder the inquisitive mind from foragingfreely. Yet suppose that the “historical social sciences”had been instituted in my university. Surrounded bythrongs of new colleagues, many of them interesting peo-ple working on interesting topics, I would consider theprevious separation odd indeed. On getting to know mynew colleagues better, however, I would find a good num-ber whose inclinations to sweeping armchair theorizing,tenacious adherence to a specific master concept ormethod, and reductionist modeling of human nature andsociety’s workings I considered unhealthy. And amongthe others I would find a considerable number who weresimply not very interested in societies other than theEuro-American ones they studied. Therefore, in formingsubgroups and specializations at some point I would stillgravitate to those who shared my belief in the value of

in-depth studies of exemplary cases, employed a systemsperspective, and took a broad and comparative interestin the human condition. While those I would feel drawnto would include practitioners of all the former disci-plines and certainly also many sociologists, the numberof anthropologists would be large. Chances are that inthe end I would find myself more or less where I wasbefore.

Wallerstein suggests that there are more sensible waysof subdividing, for instance, along the three grand the-oretical orientations or, rather, scientific temperamentsthat he outlines. Here he appears to be thinking of con-ditions in sociology, where the followers of, say, game

theory, social network analysis, Luhmannian systemstheory, or new institutional economics may pass entirecareers without being forced to leave their favourite par-adigms. Taking anthropological research inspired byWallerstein’s own work as an example, however, I be-lieve that studies based on such diverse approaches asthose of Bradley et al. (1990), Gewertz and Errington(1991), and (to cover the middle range) Robinson (1986)still belong together. There should be scholars who tryto keep abreast of all this work and integrate it into theirown perspectives. In anthropology, research experienceon a variety of topics and/or societies, approached froma variety of positions on the nomothetic-idiographiccon-tinuum, continues to be a prerequisite for a successfulcareer, and this has kept anthropologists of different the-oretical persuasions able to talk to one another and useeach other’s results with a realistic sense of their possibleworth and limitations.

Disciplines should be thematically, not methodologi-cally or paradigmatically, defined; “world systems stud-ies” would appear a more reasonable discipline to methan “idiographic studies.” New insights and societalchanges have already led to the establishment of a num-ber of such “studies” (cultural, gender, gay, lesbian, etc.),demonstrating that the 19th-century framework of dis-ciplines is not a straitjacket. Ideas also travel ratherfreely. I therefore wonder whether the classic discipli-nary boundaries really are a “major obstacle.” The po-tential for constructive exchange across disciplines isnot, of course, exhausted. Ceasing to ignore each other’smethods would be an important first step, as Wallersteinis right to emphasize. Certainly, too, the social sciencesare often not well organized. The customary faculty part-ners of social/cultural anthropology in the United States,for example—physical anthropology, archaeology, andlinguistics—are not necessarily closer to what most ofthe discipline’s practitioners are currently doing than,for example, sociology or history. Rearranging the exist-ing disciplines could therefore be fruitful.

To jump on the merger bandwagon, however, I wouldneed a clearer view of the course that would be followedthereafter, given that—as Wallerstein points out and aglance at the corporate world confirms—downsizing isthe only consequence that is dead-certain. After all, theclassic disciplines are established brands, known bymany and not as compromised as Wallerstein argues.Such disciplinary capital should not be wasted as the

balkanization that Wallerstein anticipates would be sureto do. In any event, there is nothing to stop us fromthinking, talking, and publishing across the borders. Itake Wallerstein’s lecture as valuable encouragement inthis regard.

Two asides trouble me somewhat. First, Wallersteinpresents Bell’s insinuation that anthropologists tend tofail to take their informants’ reasons seriously in a seem-ingly neutral way. For most anthropologists, however,taking people’s reasons seriously is the whole point ofdoing ethnographic fieldwork, and they tend to detachthemselves far less from the people they study than othersocial scientists. Second, the “passionate debate inside

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the American Anthropological Association” was notabout whether “taking notes as the natives slaughtereach other” is a good thing but about whether specificanthropologists actually performed specific unethicalacts (which remains contested [see the report of theAmerican Anthropological Association’s El Dorado TaskForce at http://www.aaanet.org/edtf/index.htm]).

c r a i g c a l h o u nSocial Science Research Council, 810 Seventh Ave.,New York, N.Y. 10019, U.S.A. ([email protected]).23 iv 03

One of the many useful points Wallerstein makes is thatthe famous categories of the Methodenstreit invoke afalse opposition. We are not condemned to choose be-tween idiographic and nomothetic perspectives but canuse both at once.

Since this diagnosis is sound, it is somewhat surprisingthat Wallerstein’s ultimate vision of how the social sci-ences might be reorganized incorporates a restatementof the Methodenstreit categories. There will always bethose pursuing idiographic and nomothetic agendas, hesuggests, but let us make sure there is also a place forthose who seek to overcome them through the writingof grand historical narratives. Indeed, I hope such a placeexists, but it is not the only valuable intellectual projector style that spans the division of particular anduniversal.

Ethnography, for a start, need not be a pursuit of theradically particular; instead, it can be precisely an en-gagement with comparison and the development of gen-eralizations. The comparisons will ideally be attentiveto context, and the generalizations will commonly belimited. Context may include the kind of macrohistor-ical situations Wallerstein’s approach would help eth-nographers to identify but might also situate particularcases in relation to a range of other broader phenomenafrom languages and religions to geography and ecology.The limits on generalization may be clearly recognizedor left implicit, to be raised by the kind of statementWallerstein characterizes as “but not in Pago Pago.”What is important is that asking questions like how mat-rilineal descent organization shapes the accumulation ofproperty is inherently generalizing—even when onestarts by asking it only in one place—and inherently open

to debate over the scope of application of any relationshipidentified. This is a crucial reason anthropologists mas-ter a range of major ethnographies.

But of course ethnography, at least as most frequentlypracticed, cannot reveal everything, and to claim it asan exclusive research style is to put on blinders. Theupheaval wrought in anthropology a generation (or two)ago by starting to take history, state structures, coloni-alism, and capitalism more seriously is evidence of this(but not an argument for consigning ethnography to thepurely idiographic). Context matters, in other words, andnot only immediate context. Many of the most impor-tant intellectual disputes are about just what context is

most relevant for understanding specific phenomena.Asking how valley states generally relate to mountain“tribes” (possibly even producing them by driving somepeople from richer to poorer land) thus transforms theway one may look at social organization in any village

or region; relating this to ecology and agricultural tech-nologies further interrelates the general and the partic-ular. One can also situate this within the histories ofparticular states or regions and within more global his-tories that shape the patterns of local and regional re-lations. As I think Wallerstein would agree, the issue isnot so much scale as the need to consider the multiplerelevant contexts.

This points back to why Wallerstein’s tripartite divi-sion of the social sciences worries me. Many of the mostproductive questions arise from efforts to relate theseemingly particular to the apparently general. I wouldhope that any future organization of the social scienceswould perpetuate such arguments and provoke them innewly creative ways by forcing researchers with differentperspectives and characteristic styles to confront eachother’s work more often. Put another way, part of theproblem with disciplines is precisely that they have de-veloped characteristic styles of work—the “methods”into which students are ritually initiated—and theseminimize the frequency of intellectually exciting chal-lenges to conventional opinion and seemingly obviousobservations. Economists usually confront only othereconomists and, at least in the United States, only oneswho accept a variety of background assumptions fromthe neoclassical model (and from the high value placedon mathematicization). Anthropologists too often con-

front only others who give primacy to face-to-face rela-tionships—understanding language from speech, all so-cial relationships from interpersonal ones, all institu-tions from the local manifestations. Old ideals of the“four fields” might be trotted out at this point to reassureanthropologists that the discipline still tries to study hu-manity as a whole, but it is hard to make a realistic caseeither that the interrelationships among the fields are asthe ideology suggests or that the four exhaust the rele-vant range of approaches. Surely sociology, political sci-ence, and economics are as important for a cultural an-thropologist (let alone a social anthropologist)as physicalanthropology or archaeology.

Wallerstein is right that disciplines are more mattersof turf, careerism, and institutional inertia than intel-lectual principle. He is also right that external pressureson the disciplinary structure are growing. It makes sensefor social scientists to seek out a better structure our-selves rather than only defend the existing one. But Ihope that whatever develops will be not merely a place-ment of like with like but a basis for creating fruitfulconfrontations among different styles of research. Thesecould happen in projects defined around places, theories,or clusters of intellectual problems that are illuminatedby several styles of research.

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