DEVELOPMENT STUDIES EPISTEMOLOGIES WORKSHOP

December 10, 2011

School of International DevelopmentUniversity of East Anglia

School of International Development (DEV) at UEA • Introductions• Workshop purposesDevelopment research priorities:

– Poverty and wellbeing– Social justice and inequality – Environmental sustainability– Studying change

Disciplines, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary research

Key terms

OntologyEpistemology• Theories of knowledge• Justificatory strategiesMethodology

The knowledge required for a particular theoretical perspective..

MethodsThe means of acquiring that knowledge – testimony, observation and measurement, historical traces.

Social social science epistemologies

‘Evidence is there, in its primary form, not to disclose its own meaning, but to be interrogated by minds trained in a discipline of attentive disbelief’ (EP Thompson ‘The poverty of theory’)

Natural and social sciences and the extent to which the observer and the observed are separated. ‘The view from nowhere’.

Social science epistemologies must deal with the influence of the subject on the object – and the consequences of this for the process of knowing and for the knowledge produced.

 

Objectivity, subjectivity, and bias

For social sciences, knowledge depends on understanding, and regulating, the relationship between researcher and researched.

• A source of ‘bias’ for economists… ‘measurement error’ • Important in how social social scientists understand the research process

and the character and reliability of research outputs. The sociology of science:• is a view from nowhere possible?• is science value-free?   

Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts:• Paradigm shifts depend not on truth but on social judgements • Scientific knowledge is subjective.• [aside] Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurate Amartya Sen and ‘positional objectivity’. •  

• ‘The nature of objectivity in epistemology, decision theory, and ethics has to take adequate note of the parametric dependence of observation and inference on the position of the observer.’

• ‘What we can observe depends on our position vis-a-vis the objects of observation. What we decide to believe is influenced by what we observe. How we decide to act relates to our beliefs’.

• observations•  

Identities of scientists:  

• Gendered exclusions – unmarked identities, interests and values

• Primatology (Donna Haraway)

• Brain and biology (Janet Sayers).

Social constructionism • People always see the world through the lens of their

own values, experience etc.  • The post modernist end point. • Critical realism - Roy Bhaskar. Socially constructed

perceptions of researchers exist within a reality external to researchers. (Sayers, Archer, Collier)

What constitutes knowledge in social anthropology?

 1. Anthropology is often seeking knowledge about meanings: • Geertz - culture is the webs of significance that humans spin for themselves,

and the analysis of culture is ‘not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’ (1973:5).

 • This focus on meaning, and how to grasp it across the cultural divides between

researchers and respondents, shapes much of what is characteristic about how anthropologists think about what constitutes reliable knowledge.

 • The project is a very different one to research which aims – through statistical

analysis to reliably describe how things are. Thus the criticism of the absence of typicality in some of the methods of anthropology is wide of the mark.

 

The telling rather than the typical

 . Distinctive approach to inferences Quantitative data include two kinds of inference:a) enumerative induction – sampling theory and practices ensure that

the sample is representative of the wider population in terms of population values

b) analytical induction – inference that the theoretical relationships observed in the sample also hold for the population.

Inferences from case studies are based analytical induction.Thus case studies need to be ‘telling’ rather than ‘typical’ (Clyde Mitchell.  

Thick description

A thick description of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider.

• See Geertz on the wink(1973 ‘Thick description: towards an interpretive theory of culture’ page 6-7)

Ways of knowing: testimony and observation 

Testimony

Emic and etic derived from the linguistic terms terms phomenic and phonetic

Proposed as a way to clarify the ‘objective’.

• emic – testimony given by a person within the culture, and in terms meaningful to her.

• etic - description given by an observer, in terms that can be applied to other cultures, attempting to be 'culturally neutral'.

Voice

Linguistic anthropology of speech. Erving Goffman distinguishes between the animator of the words, the author who establishes what is being said the principle whose interests drives the content  We also know that some people are more or less able, to or entitled, to speak than others • there are many registers, styles and genres of speech – eg oratory, private talk,

etc.  • testimony is a cultural product – eloquence, directness, lying, metaphors, silences

– and cannot be taken as a direct expression of a personal ‘voice’.

Epistemological doubt over testimony as evidence  

[Participant] observation

 Malinowski, Trobriand Islanders, 1914.• long-term work, language knowledge, and an openness to experience

and voices, rather than a pre-determined set of hypotheses.  • Knowledge from extended first hand experience through fieldwork is a

foundational epistemology in anthropology.

Examples: 

• Gluckman and the bridge

• Geertz and the cock fight

Rigour in anthropological knowledge

 • Depth of knowledge

• Falsification • ‘Evidence is there, in its primary form, not to disclose its own

meaning, but to be interrogated by minds trained in a discipline of attentive disbelief’ (EP Thompson The poverty of theory)

• Triangulation see Robert Chambers

Feminist epistemologies 

 

Politics and objectivity: Feminist epistemologies – a pro-women stance.  Can an explicit social justice orientation strengthen research, rather than constituting ‘bias’?

Feminist theorists argue for • the value of tapping into the particular knowledges of women• the importance of their inclusion to produce less distorted, truer, knowledge• the compromised claims to objectivity of mainstream social science.  Eg sample surveys• an equal chance of inclusion? • an equal ability to ‘speak’? • an equal ability to be understood? • ?

Context and ‘strong objectivity’  “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.”(Donald Rumsfeld ex- Sec State Defense)

Feminist critics argue that science lacks objectivity in the ways research questions are arrived at, weighted and ranked, and supported.

 Standpoint theory has a ‘strong’ objectivity compared to the ‘weak’ objectivity of science, as it includes

objectivity in the context of discovery.   

Unconscious bias - double-blind, multi-centre, placebo controlled testing of drugs, are used precisely to exclude the effects of values and biases, … make the point that ‘feminist empiricist epistemology …produces arguments of the same type as those already accepted by our knowledge practices’ (2005:191).

 Thus feminist epistemology is an explicitly political enterprise, but one that is justified by epistemic values,

such as reason and empirical adequacy, to which science `already declares its allegiance.’ (Anderson 2005:192)

 

Researcher identities and reflexivity

Reflexivity - we are part of that order we research and as researchers we create the reality we seek to describe.

Awareness of how data is influenced by respondent views about the researcher, the research, the possible consequences of particular responses and so on.

For example, Tixier y Vigil and Elsasser (1976).

Relevant to all development studies researchers.

Data is co-created.

Researcher subjectivitiesThe personal histories we take into encounters with others can be both enabling and inhibiting.

Dialectical ‘tacking’ between local detail and larger structural

Neither imposition of researchers views on the subject of study nor abject acceptance of the views of the researched.

Critical engagement of researcher as sceptical interpreter.

The legitimacy, in feminist epistemologies, of personal experience

Subjectivities and interdisciplinary research? the elemental knowledge-carrier is the person, as individual researcher. ‘[P]ersons ferry knowledge about, drawing on quite different aspects of their own biographies, in ways that might be quite unpredictable’. (Strathern 2004: 25)

Other ways of knowing

Maternal thinking (Ruddick).Rationality – empathy as expanded rationality Emotional epistemologies 

– Gloria Goodwin Raheja (1996) on women’s speech practices in rural north India. ‘Call me back quickly, mother/Beg with folded hands’

– I believe this to be true because my own life experience tells me so.

Disciplinary and political bridgeheads.Admitting one’s own ‘knowing by feeling’.  Sen’s ‘reasoned scrutiny’ could admit knowing by feeling, as one kind of knowledge to triangulate with others.

Testimony and power

  Testimony – a primary way in which we come to know. A complex social

process. Attention to power.  Speech and silence….. .  ‘In the feminist practice of ‘reading’ silence, our caution must be neither to

pronounce definitively that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ nor to romanticise silence as the subaltern’s refusal to speak’ (Rajan 1993:87-8).

  Feminist approaches to testimony • differential abilities to ‘speak’ and to ‘hear’, • reliance on direct speech alone, as evidence, is unwise,• speech is not to be equated with power and silence with weakness.

References

Sen A (1993) Positional Objectivity Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 126-145 Geertz C (1973) The interpretation of cultures Basic Books Evens T and Handelman D (2008) The Manchester School: practice and ethnographic praxis in anthropology

Berghahn Books Moore H and Sanders T (2006) Anthropology in theory: issues in epistemology Blackwell Ellen R (1984) Ethnographic research: a guide to general conduct Academic Press Jackson C (2006) ‘Feminism spoken here’ Development and Change 37(3) 525-527

Anderson E (2005) ‘Feminist epistemology: an interpretation and a defense’ in Cudd A and Andreasen R (eds) Feminist Theory: a philosophical anthology Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp188-209

e

References

Harding S (2005) Rethinking standpoint epistemology: what is ‘strong objectivity’?’ in Cudd A and Andreasen R

(eds) Feminist Theory: a philosophical anthology Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 218-236

Rajan R (1993) Real and imagined women: gender, culture and postcolonialism London: Routledge

Ruddick S (1989) Maternal thinking; towards a politics of peace Bostan MA: Beacon Spivak G (1993) ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Williams P and Chrisman L (eds) Colonial discourse and post-colonial

theory New York/London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Strathern M (2004) ‘Commons and borderlands. Working papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the

Flow of Knowledge’. Oxford: Sean Kingston Publishing Wolf D (1996) ‘Situating feminist dilemmas in fieldwork’ in Wolf (ed) Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork Boulder,

Colorado: Westview Press, pp1-55

References

Ardener E (1975) ‘Belief and the problem of women’ in Ardener S (ed) Perceiving Women London: Malaby Press pp1-19

Drinkwater M (1992) Visible actors and visible researchers: critical hermeneutics in an actor-oriented

perspective Sociologia Ruralis XXXII, 367-388

Haraway D (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the priviledge of partial perspective’ Feminist Studies 14(3) 575-99

Gluckman M (2002) ‘The bridge: analysis of a social situation in Zululand’, in Vincent J (ed) The anthropology of politics Blackwell