Abstract
The problem of rationality emerges in anthropology when actions and ideas strike the ethnographer as inconsistent with commonsense or with science (e.g. to get crops you plant seeds; chanting is neither here nor there). The commonsense and the science appealed to are those of the society to which the anthropologist belongs or into which he has been socialized. Hence the problem is intrinsically ethnocentric. Rationality assessments are comparative judgments with no presupposition that perfect rationality is anywhere achieved or achievable. Rationality is normative: a work in progress. We strive to be ever more consistent whilst knowing we can never achieve perfection. An alternative proposal appears in a recent paper by Lukes on rationality and in Sørensen’s critique of my intellectualist view. These are criticized in their turn and it is reaffirmed that judgments of comparative rationality do little or no explanatory work. Beliefs and assertions as such are neither rational nor irrational; it is only our actions regarding them that can be so assessed. Explanation proceeds by matching means to postulated ends in defined situations, whether the ends are articulated or must be supplied by the social scientist as hypotheses to be tested. Ritual actions like chanting are pervasive. The place of ritual in science and the place of ritual in magic are quite different.
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Notes
- 1.
As when Williams called them a “madness”, see F. E. Williams and J. H. P. Murray, The Vaillala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf Division, Papua: Anthropology Reports No. 4, Port Moresby: AMS Press.
- 2.
The Revolution in Anthropology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Lawrence (1965).
- 3.
F. E. Williams and J. H. P. Murray, The Vaillala Madness and the Destruction of Native Ceremonies in the Gulf Division, Papua: Anthropology Reports No. 4, Port Moresby: AMS Press. Williams lamented that cargo cults disrupted traditional native life.
- 4.
Wilson (1970).
- 5.
Turner and Risjord (2007).
- 6.
I am irresistibly reminded of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes: “Birth, and copulation, and death/That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks”. Horton’s list is longer and Malinowski’s Basic Needs are somewhat similar. The Brass Tacks theory is not the list of brass tacks (see next note) but the idea that all humans calculate logically and coherently when it comes to them.
- 7.
Popper (1963).
- 8.
Wittgenstein was deeply contemptuous of the English: “How narrow is the spiritual life for Frazer. Thus, how impossible to understand another life in terms of the English life of his time! Frazer can imagine no priest who is not basically an English parson of our time, with all his stupidity and dullness” (Tambiah 60). Wittgenstein’s views do nothing to curb his ethnocentrism.
- 9.
Tambiah (1990).
- 10.
One interesting implication: magic in a magico-religious society is more rational than magic in our society. Along one dimension, then, a simpler yet non-scientific society may be more rational than a scientific society pervaded by magic, as ours is.
- 11.
Agassi (1981).
- 12.
For a discussion of this phrase and its role in functionalist anthropology see the subject index entry ‘study the ritual, not the belief’ in my The Revolution in Anthropology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1964.
- 13.
Perhaps his theological background shows in his invocation of the category of the sacred as though it were unproblematic. My own inclination would be to see the sacred simply as a label attached to certain sorts of rituals. Not the scientists round the water cooler ritual, but the scientists on their knees in church.
References
Agassi, J. (1981). “Faith has nothing to do with rationality”, reprinted in his Science and Society, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Lawrence, P. (1965). Road belong cargo. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Lukes, S. (2007). “The problem of apparently irrational beliefs”. In P. T. Stephen & W. R. Mark (Eds.), Philosophy of anthropology and sociology, volume in the handbook of the philosophy of science series (pp. 591-606). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Popper, K. R. (1963). “Back to the Pre-Socratics”, in his Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Tambiah, S. J. (1990). Magic, science, religion and the scope of rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, S. P., & Risjord, M. W. (Eds.). (2007). Philosophy of anthropology and sociology, handbook of philosophy of sciences, series. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Wilson, B. R. (Ed.). (1970). Rationality. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Acknowledgements
This paper had its origins in a workshop on “Individual and Collective Rationality” held under the auspices of the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales of the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis on March 21–22 2011. My thanks to the organizers, Richard Arena, Alban Bouvier, and Bernard Conein, for the invitation and the prompt it gave me to revisit these questions.
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Jarvie, I. (2018). Rationality and Irrationality Revisited or Intellectualism Vindicated or How Stands the Problem of the Rationality of Magic?. In: Bronner, G., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Mystery of Rationality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94028-1_9
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