The Weak Suffer What They Must — A Natural Experiment in Thought and Structure
That’s usually where the story stops. We observe and deduce patterns. If we are quantitative in our tastes, if we want to show the patterns and make them accessible to others to observe and test, we translate some of these into measures. If we are empirically oriented, we test hypotheses about the relationships among variables we can measure and base other speculations on theoretical assertions and empirical findings of the past. The association of the cognitive pattern with the structure seems plausible for want of any convincing measure of structure that would be more than a poor proxy. But we could argue, I suppose, that the cultures of worksites are sufficiently different to cause different structures. Just because it doesn’t seem plausible to me doesn’t mean that it mightn’t to someone else.
However, when the chief steward at Schwab retired just before the unit negotiated a new contract, Suzan and I were presented with the possibility of at least a quasi-experimental design. We had the triads tests from 1996, and now in 1998 we could administer them again, after a significant structural change, to detect whether the patterns of thought had changed with the change of structure. This brought together what Alford (1998) calls multivariate, historical, and ethnographic approaches to bear on a single theoretical question at a single worksite and a significant practical issue.
Theoretical backgrounds
From advertising to education there are modern institutional structures dedicated to the proposition that the way to change people’s actions is to change their minds, a proposal that rests on the assumption that thought determines action. When Jean Lave (1988), attempting to understand how people learn and use that most cerebral of cognitive skills–mathematics–challenged transference theory, the notion that we can isolate abstract properties of systems and communicate them to others via symbols, she advocated expanding our understanding of cognition from something that happens in the mind to a process that stretches over the environment as well as time into past experiences and future expectations. In doing so she offered a new definition to a movement Ortner (1984) detected in the attempts to synthesize and sort out anthropological theorizing since the 1960’s, a trend she tentatively called practice theory.
Some who called themselves cognitive anthropologists, before boring themselves to death, as Keesing (1972) quipped in a pre-mature death knell (Durrenberger 1982), described well structured patterns of thought they understood by talking to people. In a precursor of the now fashionable “linguistic turn” (Pálsson 1995) some (Black 1969) even argued that because cultures were things of the mind embodied in language anthropologists had only to talk to people to understand their cultures.
Other cognitive anthropologists questioned the salience of such language centered patterns. Van Esterik (1978) showed that the taxonomy of spirit-ghosts in Thailand that Brown et al (1976) described could not be correct and concludes that, “the process of creating guardian spirits is continuous . . . . ” (Van Esterik 1978:405). Durrenberger and Morrison (1978) showed that other “taxonomies” in the same article were equally incorrect. Challenging language-centered analyses, Gatewood (1985) discussed the complex patterns of cultures that are not encoded linguistically, not available for labeling, and not accessible to language or language-centered investigative techniques. People learn some things not by hearing about them but by doing them. Actions, he said in his title, speak louder than words. A decade later Pálsson (1994), reflecting on similarly nautical experiences, reached a similar conclusion.
Few today would argue that any structures–cognitive, political, economic–endure. We have seen too much change in patterns of economic, political, and cultural relations for the premise of systems in equilibrium, even dynamic (Chinese on kachin) to be persuasive. The riddle repeats an earlier one–what are the directions of causality? From thought to action as structuralists and cognitivists would have it? Or from structures of power and other relationships to thought as materialists would have it?
One solution is the extreme postmodernist one, which argues that structures of meaning are not anchored in the outside world (1997:186). Another might be to affirm that everything affects everything else and we cannot sort it all out because it’s too complex. At best we can provide an appreciation for the complexity by some attempt to recapitulate it in another mode. Replication of reality needs no mediation–only experience, not reflection, analysis, or depiction. This is counter to the principles of both art and science which attempt to simplify reality rather than replicate it. While it may be true that everything is related, we do not see hurricane forecasters watching butterflies to detect how the beat of their individual wings will impact el nino.
Here we return to a practical issue and the work of Jean Lave. If patterns of thought are situational, determined by changing social structures, then it is not effective to try to change social patterns by changing minds. Education, in the sense of transference of patterns, is not the answer. The only contradiction here is that we are trying to change your mind by just that means! On the other hand, we are content with the understanding that while we will change no one’s mind, we may add to the empirical findings of anthropology an example that will be of use to others of similar empirical bent.
For some, these questions are of more than theoretical or academic interest. Suzan Erem is the union representative assigned to Schwab. Here, she takes up the story to tell what happened. We see her formulating and testing various hypotheses and attending to the outcomes, because it was those outcomes that were important in trying to bring about the changes she desired.