The Saving Lie: Truth and Method in the Social Sciences

Chapter 5. Imaginative Constructs and Social Reality

Chapter 5 Imaginative Constructs and Social Reality The poet's eye, in afine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms ofthings unknown, the poet's pen Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. -Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream Structure in The Nuer One cannot but admire the elegance of The Nuer. Herbert Simon's word echoes again in the mind; ifany monograph in social anthropology deserves to be called beautiful, it is The Nuer. As one reads it, one grasps, so it seems, the very essence ofNuer society, and knows it completely . Evans-Pritchard himself, perhaps, had in 1940 already quietly accomplished what, ten years later, he laid down programmatically as the goal of the anthropologist: "to discover the structural order of the society, the patterns of which, once established, enable him to see it as a whole, as a set ofinter-related abstractions" (1962, 22). It is easy, however, to forget that all models, being abstractions from a more complex reality, have limited applications. Neoclassical economists-this complaint ran through the first part of this bookcreate models that are too much removed from the complex reality of everyday experience; the more elegant they are, the further they are removed. At the same time, since most economists still want theirs to be a positive science, one that applies to the real world, they choose not to hear when Coase claims that they create imaginary worlds to fit their models. Evans-Pritchard is perfectly straightforward about the issue. Here he is again, describing structure: "[It] cannot be seen. It is a set of abstractions, each of which, though derived, it is true, from the Imaginative Constructs and Social Reality 89 analysis of observed behavior, is fundamentally an imaginative construct of the anthropologist himself. By relating these abstractions to one another logically so that they present a pattern, he can see the society in its essentials and as a single whole" (1962, 23). That sentence requires commentary, especially when set beside his other claim (quoted earlier) that, if this procedure is adopted, social anthropology will be "released from [the] essentially philosophical dogmas [of positivism ] and given the opportunity, though it may seem paradoxical to say so, to be really empirical and, in the true sense of the word, scientific." To be released from "philosophical dogmas" is not to see things as they are (that is impossible, because it would imply that one could perceive something without first having a model of what it is), but to see them in a way that is not possible when still bound by positivist dogma. The anthropologist, instead of paying attention only to what fits with the model of positive science, and inventing, say, a Nuer world to accommodate Radcliffe-Brown's vision ofa natural science of society, would be "really empirical" and submit the model of Nuer conduct to the evidence ofwhat Nuer do and say, and therefore would be scientific "in the true sense ofthe word." From the point of view of scientific method, to say that EvansPritchard 's structure is "an imaginative construct" is not at all paradoxical . An imaginative construct is only what others, less dogmatically antipositivist, would call an assumption or general proposition or presupposition that can be used to make sense of observed data. Social structure, functional unity, expected utility, general equilibrium, natural selection , and so forth are all imaginative constructs. Nor should the word imaginative be too comprehensively applied: it does not mean that Evans-Pritchard used nothing but his imagination to construct (that is, invent) Nuer ideas about space and time or descent and territory, and that, consequently, his depiction of the Nuer is a fantasy like The Wind in the Willows or The Hobbit. The Nuer clearly is anchored to some kind of reality. The issue is what reality and, in particular, what other realities have not been accommodated in the model, and do the omissions matter? The Nuer is an elegant book. Elegance is achieved by abstraction, abstraction entails omission, and omission must have an opportunity cost. Essence and Wholes Omission also, if Evans-Pritchard is right, has a benefit: "by relating these abstractions to one another logically so that they present a pattern," the anthropologist "can see the society in its essentials and as 90 Morality a single whole." How is one...