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but then the reader is entitled to know something of the aims, expectations, hopes and attitudes that the writer brought to the field with him, for these will surely influence not only how he sees things but even what he sees. At best his story will be only a partial one. ’ You are criticising Turnbull for lack of objectivity? For a complete absence of objectivity. Surely Karl Popper has exploded the idea of ’Scientific objectivity’ once and for all? All description he points out, is selective. In order to describe the infinite variety and wealth of what we observe we have at our disposal only a finite number affinité series of words. Thus we may describe as long as we like : our description will always be incomplete, mere selection, and a small one at that, of the facts which present themselves for description. Popper concludes that it is not only impossible to avoid a selective point of view, but also wholly undesirable to attempt to do so; for if we could do so, we should not get a more ’objective’ description, but only a heap of entirely unconnected statements. A point of view is inevitable; and the naive attempts to avoid it can oply lead to self-deception. Then may I quote Lévi-Strauss? ’The first aim of anthropology is to be objective, to inclucate objective habits and to teach objective methods ... The observer, he says, must place himself above his own personal beliefs, preferences and prejudices. That, I submit, is what Turnbull failed to do. Could anyone do it? To quote Marx: ’lt is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.’ Turnbull took with him the attitudes of a middle-class Englishman and an American academic and observed the Ik from that standpoint. They tried to communicate with him in the vocabulary formed by their social existence. Turnbull writes that the one standard by which the Ik measure right and wrong, goodness and badness, is in terms offood. The very word for ’good’, marang, is defined in terms of food. ’Goodness’, marangik, is defined simply as food’, or if you press them, this will be clarified as ’the possesion offood’, and still further clarified as ’individual possession of food’. Then, Turnbull says, if you try the word as an adjective and attempt to discover what their concept is of a ’good man’, iakw anamarang, hoping that the answer will be that a good man is a man who helps you fill your own stomach, you get the truly Icien answer: a good man is one who has a full stomach. For the Ik, there is goodness in being, but none in doing —at least not in doing to others ... Now, consider our use of the word ’good’ in the phrases ’having a good time’, ’being of good birth’, ’being a good girl’ or’a good soldier’; giving someone ’a good thrashing’; ’leading a good life’, or ’being good in bed ... ’All ’good’ appears to mean to us is a conformity to the social norms or expectations of a given group. It seems to me that, compared with us, the Ik should be congratulated on their linguistic precision. Lévi-Strauss wrote that the observer must reason on the basis of concepts which are valid not merely for an honest

and objective observer, but for all possible observers as three physicists observing, let us say, the formation of a crystal can all agree that they have seen the same thing. Your three physicists will only agree on what they see because they have invented and share a common language. A child might see the crystal as a model of a mountain; a priest might see it as a wopdrous work of God. Why do the physicists, technologists and mathematicians succeed in making things work, while economists, psychologists and social scientists run round in circles? Because if the pure scientists find their language doesn’t work, they change it. Take the famous Paradox of the Liar, as described by Popper. A man gets up in the morning and announces: ’All that I say today is a lie’; or, more precisely, ’All statements that I make today are false.’ He then says nothing else for the rest of the day. Now if we ask ourselves whether he spoke the truth, this is what we find. If we start with the assumption that what he said was true, then we arrive, considering what he said, at the result that it must have been false. If we start with the assumption that what he said was false, then we must conclude, considering what he said, that it was true. To argue about Turnbull’s subjectivity or objectivity is quite pointless, when the language he has to use is capable of such manifest absurdities. The unscientific nature of present-day anthropology has been admitted by Lévi-Strauss. He describes the technical vocabulary of anthropology as chaotic there is no firm agreement on the meaning of its principal terms. ’Surprisingly enough’, he writes, ’lt is at the very moment when anthropology finds itself closer than ever to the long-awaited goal of becoming a true science that the ground seems to fail where it was expected to be the firmest; the facts themselves are lacking, either not numerous enough or not collected under conditions insuring their comparability ~. Though it is not our fault, we have been behaving like amateur botanists ... we cannot help feeling in a disheartened mood. It looks almost as if cosmic physics were asked to work with Babylonian observations.’ Professor Leach, of Cambridge University, draws our attention to Lévi-Strauss’s comment that we Europeans have been taught from infancy to be self-centred and individualistic and to fear the impurity of foreign things, a doctrine which we embody in the formula ’Hell is the others’ (V enfer, c’est les autres) a quatiation from Sartre’s Huit Clos; but primitive myth has the opposite moral implication, ’Hell is ourselves’ ¡l’enfer c’est nous-même ). Surely Colin Turnbull is trying to reconcile or homogeonise those two statements. The same Professor Leach is also rather scatheing about Professor Lévi-Strauss’s experience in the field. I quote: ’ln the whole course of his Brazilian travels, Lévi-Strauss can never have stayed in one place for more that a few weeks at a time ... he was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language.’ Perhaps, therefore, :évi-Sírauss is defending himself in telling the story of one of the fathers of anthropology, Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. When it was suggested to this great man that he might actually