Why A Social Impact Assesor/Social Planner is an Anthropologist (continuation)
She meant of course “sympathetic resonance”, the feeling that the other person was making sense because it was meaningful and understandable. Juergen Habermas would say that communicative rationality was achieved, and even earlier, Weber would be nodding his head and saying that there was intersubjective and meaningful interpretation.
Understanding from the emic point of view is what the anthropologists excel at. They have the sense, the gut feel, the sympathy and intuition, sometimes bordering on telepathy at what “aliens” are trying to say; they cross cultural boundaries in their minds and go to the guts, to the heart of the "target" group, and make sense of what they essentially are: persons who have feelings, intentions and thoughts, although they may speak totally outlandish sounds and make weird gestures at first impressions.
Tell me that quantitative and positivist sociologists do that. Like you can tell your great grandma.
So as a sociologist who often works at development projects intended for indigenae, I had to supplement my empiricist training with the anthropological. I had to understand, Ilocano, Waray, Bisaya and Kapampangan aside from my native Tagalog and English. I had to learn French, German and Russian, and also American sign language because a man gains another soul when he speaks another language. You may raise educated eyebrows at this, but the semantics and syntactics of another language can really be mastered only if you think in that language, even to the extent that you can dream in that language. This in my opinion goes a giant step beyond learning a foreign tongue as a second language (FLSL) paradigm.
That poor candidate, who was defending her anthropologically sound dissertation was confronted by a panel of positivists, quantitatively inclined social scientists who frowned upon Verstehende methods. It was totally an unfair fight because they were forcing totally “alien” standards down on her throat. They were asking outlandish questions like, “where are your tables?” which meant figures and numbers. That she spent hours and hours interacting with them meant almost nothing to the panel without summary statistics, charts, and figures.
Which by the way, is what the executives at a planning agency will look for when you submit the consultant’s report. In such a scenario, good luck to your field methods and emic accounts.
Understanding from the emic point of view is what the anthropologists excel at. They have the sense, the gut feel, the sympathy and intuition, sometimes bordering on telepathy at what “aliens” are trying to say; they cross cultural boundaries in their minds and go to the guts, to the heart of the "target" group, and make sense of what they essentially are: persons who have feelings, intentions and thoughts, although they may speak totally outlandish sounds and make weird gestures at first impressions.
Tell me that quantitative and positivist sociologists do that. Like you can tell your great grandma.
So as a sociologist who often works at development projects intended for indigenae, I had to supplement my empiricist training with the anthropological. I had to understand, Ilocano, Waray, Bisaya and Kapampangan aside from my native Tagalog and English. I had to learn French, German and Russian, and also American sign language because a man gains another soul when he speaks another language. You may raise educated eyebrows at this, but the semantics and syntactics of another language can really be mastered only if you think in that language, even to the extent that you can dream in that language. This in my opinion goes a giant step beyond learning a foreign tongue as a second language (FLSL) paradigm.
That poor candidate, who was defending her anthropologically sound dissertation was confronted by a panel of positivists, quantitatively inclined social scientists who frowned upon Verstehende methods. It was totally an unfair fight because they were forcing totally “alien” standards down on her throat. They were asking outlandish questions like, “where are your tables?” which meant figures and numbers. That she spent hours and hours interacting with them meant almost nothing to the panel without summary statistics, charts, and figures.
Which by the way, is what the executives at a planning agency will look for when you submit the consultant’s report. In such a scenario, good luck to your field methods and emic accounts.
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