In this previous blog post about the relationship between anthropology and art I quoted Susan Hiller, an academic that left the field of anthropology to become an artist in order to escape ‘the writing of a doctoral thesis whose objectification of the contrariness of lived events was destined to become another complicit thread woven into the fabric of ‘evidence’ that would help anthropology become a ‘science’’. Hiller thinks that anthropology cannot be science. In that same post I asked if anthropologists can pick up on Hillers thoughts without giving up anthropology in its entirety. I want to go back to this question and consider Carrithers paper on the question ‘Is Anthropology art or science?’

First of, I think it’s quite interesting to see that Carrithers doesn’t seem to be very interested in the ‘art’ part of his question. That said, I think his question is misleading in that the paper makes no effort in considering the assumption that anthropology might be, in fact, art. Nonetheless, there are some overlapping points that both Hiller and Carrithers make that I would like to examine.
To begin with, there might be some important differences in the understanding of science of both. The way I understand Hillers critical view on science is that she thinks of it as a tightly woven fabric, a firm foundation whereupon facts should rest on. Anthropology, as the study of the human world (including art) on the other hand fails at creating ‘science’ because it has to interact with the people involved on a personal base in order to make sense of the world they live in and gather meaningful experiences of their world. Thus, the objectivity attributed to ‘science’ limits the anthropologists in revealing the nature of the realities studied.
Carrithers, though, is well aware of the problems that such claims of objectivity bring. What Carrithers proposes is an understanding of science that is measured not by the absolute certainty of the knowledge it creates but rather by its ‘usefulness within specific human practices’. So the question shouldn’t be if the collected data from ethnographic fieldwork is absolutely true, but if it one could act appropriately in the field with the knowledge that one gained.

What I find interesting about this is that both Hiller and Carrithers come to similar conclusions. However, It should be noted that Hiller explicitly refers to the study of art in anthropology, while Carrithers paper is concerned with the general study of the human world. Regardless of these differences both stress the importance of interaction in the study of the human. Hiller thinks that ‘art exists primarily in its relationship to the viewer who must participate in it, intimately experience it’. Similarly, Carrithers claims that ‘we cannot seek an absolutely correct, unequivocal, “scientific” understanding of such mental states apart from interaction, for it is only interaction that gives them sense’. Precisely because of its nature as a human activity, science is unable to generate absolute truths alienated from the ‘world of human practice’. In this sense Hiller, as an artist, and Carrithers, as an anthropologists, might agree on more than I thought.
So, where can art be located in all this?