Even more so since I do have diverticulosis diagnosed during a colonoscopy
I am not dismissive only very pessimistic.

Want to bet?

“who would/could fund such kind of studies?”

Chinese.

Why? Well, for one thing, because for some conditions. Chinese medicine offers effective treatments, where Western medicine has nothing to offer.

Want an example? Diverticular disease. If there is a treatment for diverticular disease which seems to work for at least some people, it would be worth researching, don’t you think?

I think you should not mock traditional Chinese medicine, nor the Ayurvedic which is just as scruffy.

1) By their time they had none of the investigation means we have now, neither theoretical (biology, physics, chemistry) not practical (technologies, instruments) and they did their best to figure out correlations between observable causes and effects without any computation resources whatsoever, no wonder the results are “approximate”.

2) The seemingly preposterous “concepts”, Qi, the elements, the meridians, the fancy organs with no corresponding physical embodiment can actually make sense if seen as latent variables within the state space of causes/effects which was available to them.

The only “scientific” way to gauge the actual effectiveness of these loony theories would be to ascertain the mutual information (*) which may or may not exist between the “traditional” observations and diagnostics, the prescribed remedies and the expected outcomes.
Unfortunately neither the “scientists” nor the traditional practitioners are interested or able to do this, plus, who would/could fund such kind of studies?

*) I specifically mention mutual information and not correlation because the relationships may not be linear.

I would agree with the first one: cultural anthropologists like to document cultural diversity ad infinitum. And disagree with the last one: cultural anthropologists refuse to exoticize cultures. Read Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other.

“my main beef is that i think some disciplines use obscurantism to service a strongly normative agenda.”

Good point, Razib. By jettisoning “science” from their statement of purpose AAA doesn’t advocate for obscurantism. In fact, if ask any cultural anthropologist, s/he would say that the rise of critical anthropology was directed precisely against obscurantism, which sometimes comes through “religion,” sometimes through “politics,” sometimes through “science.” Now, it’s clear that obscurantism can come from race studies, gender studies and whole host of other subfields of that which is neither science, nor religion, nor politics.

“And claim that “other ways of knowing” isn’t even wrong.”

Science, especially science dealing with human diversity (biological anthropology, anthropological genetics, archaeology, and sometimes historical linguistics) routinely uses other ways of knowing (aka assumptions derived from culture) to stitch data into a theory. How in the world would you apply scientific method to, say, the scattered Pleistocene leave-behinds (tools, bones, etc.) to arrive to a theory of the origin of human languages, cultures and populations?

i think alison gopnik et al. are on to something when they claim that scientific thinking can be traced back to the psychology of children

They may like to think that, considering how fast and much children learn.

Seriously, I don’t know what they say so probably misconstruing it, but personally I maintain that learning the way children do (trial-and-error and trial-and-reward) is a complement to and of course a basic tool of the science tool set.

Problem is that it is context dependent relating to subjectivity in the first place, and even when going meta, learning about patterns among patterns in data, one can facilely maintain it can never tell what is eventually wrong. So it can never tell what is eventually right in a vague sense, which on the other hand is the sharp hallmark and raison d’être of testable science.

I would then draw a surprisingly sharp dividing line between learning data and knowing facts (while maintaining a blend of tools). And claim that “other ways of knowing” isn’t even wrong.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/history-wars/2002/06/the-extinction-of-the-australian-pygmies/page:printable

Peter Bellwood is referenced in there somewhere.

When someone like Marshall Sahlins (famous cultural anthropologist) talks about Western culture, he quotes figures like Hobbes and Kant … as if Western “culture” were epitomized by philosophy and not by such pragmatic matters as kinship, economics, religion, cuisine. Probably because if you started talking about specifics, any semblance of uniformity would collapse.

I’ve also noticed that the post-modern school of anthropology is remarkably culture-bound, even in this limited philosophical sense. There are thinkers one must have read and are allowed to quote (Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu) — who all happen to be European white males. It reminds me of Christians debating (volleys of scripture texts from each side), Muslims disputing (Quranic verses and hadith), and Chinese scholars quoting Confucius or famous poets.

No one is citing Ibn Khaldun.

and as i noted earlier, the debate about the word “science” isn’t really the core of the conflict. rather, it’s the sort of thing which cropped up with the sokal affair, where some scholars believe that other scholars aren’t being technical, but obscurantist. history, for example, is not science, but by and large much of it is written in an atheoretical and non-jargonistic fashion. even marxist historians who work with a theory in mind are pretty clear in their argument because the theory isn’t too complicated. my main beef is that i think some disciplines use obscurantism to service a strongly normative agenda.

Your comparison to early naturalists is brilliant up to where you suggest a parallelism in the motive not to generalize.

My own view is that when you have a scientific approach available to you and you rebuff it, you are a charlatan at worst and intellectually lazy at best. In other words, the humanistic study of literature is legitimate because an empirical approach or any other way of knowing is unavailable, but a humanistic study of anthropology is about as valuable as a humanistic study of chemistry–save it for fiction and editorials.

The study of cultures should be ethnological where possible, and if it must be ethnographical, the standards of the ethnographic pursuit should be more like that of how historians synthesize accounts of original sources to make a coherent picture of the past (of course, these methods are not without flaws, but this standard of knowing is far superior, I think, to maintaining that “The “science-free” mission statement allows for the inclusion of a number of perspectives and approaches that have been and remain marginalized, not only in anthropology, but in much of their social and economic existence.”)

I’ve read other defenders of this change say that Anthropology is a “big tent” and the diversity of ways of knowing is what makes the field strong and that the change in this wording makes the field more inclusive and liberates the field from the hegemony of the scientific method (vomit, indeed). But my litmus test of “Are empirical methods available for what you’re trying to do? Are you using them?” would jettison those who are hawking accounts of cultures that serve an editorial purpose, not the standards which allow us to identify these people as not worth listening to.

hm. i don’t know. it seems that cultural materialists, and evolutionarily informed anthropologists, use different methods, and come to different conclusions, but their methods are of a broadly similar family. i.e., they presuppose a particular naturalistic model of how the world works. the man gap seems to be between that sort, and the anthropologists who have been influenced by, and work within, stuff like post-structuralism, critical race theory, etc. so chagnon and r. brian ferguson use somewhat different frameworks to understand conflict, but there is a fundamentally common currency. it is really hard to map stuff from critical race theory and what not onto general explanatory frameworks.

the main objection i have to this stuff is as i allude to above most cultural anthropologists who work within subjectivist frameworks seem to use it primarily as a cudgel against western culture and paradigms. they’re quite clear and certain about what they object to in western culture. but that means they have a specific and distinct model of western culture, which is pretty much as straightforward as those who don’t use their methods. in other words, i don’t think they take their methods to their rightful pyrrhonian end point.

It seems to me that in anthropology “science” is a political label and it would be good to get rid of it for that reason. I’m more concerned about statements like “Chagnon’s friends are scientists, so he’s right” or “Chagnon is right, so he’s a scientist” than this. In other words: “the scientists started it.”

For a funny take on this whole postmodernist mess in anthropology, I recommend Matt Cartmill’s 1994 lecture to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, called “Reinventing Anthropology.” It’s actually pretty funny.

-D. Holland