Anthropological Theory

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Thomas J. Csordas Anthropological Theory 2004; 4; 473 DOI: 10.1177/1463499604047922 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/4/473

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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 4(4): 473480 10.1177/1463499604047922

Evidence of and for what?

Thomas J. Csordas University of California, San Diego

Abstract What kind of language game do we initiate by making evidence the focus of methodological discussion? Drawing on the example set by Wittgenstein, our rst step might well be to consider the senses in which we can use the notion of evidence in anthropological writing. These senses must be different if we are asking for evidence of the existence or nature of a phenomenon (such as, for example, totemism or kinship), or evidence to test a hypothesis from the standpoint either of validation or falsication. The sense must also be different if evidence is to be understood in a juridical sense or an experimental sense. Again, evidence may be understood to be synonymous with data, or could imply a sense of what is evident, or even self-evidence the immediacy of experience as examined by phenomenology. To determine how these different senses of evidence color our understanding of the ethnographic enterprise is the ultimate goal of this discussion. Key Words evidence language methodology phenomenology

If someone says I dont know if theres a hand here he might be told Look closer. This possibility of satisfying oneself is part of the language-game. Is one of its essential features. Wittgenstein, On Certainty What kind of language game do we initiate by making evidence the focus of methodological discussion? Drawing on the example set by Wittgenstein, we might well consider the senses in which we can use the notion of evidence in anthropological writing, distinguishing them paradigmatically from uses of the word in ordinary language and other kinds of specialized usage, and syntagmatically from other related terms such as perception, data, or fact. To determine how different senses of evidence color our understanding of the ethnographic enterprise is the ultimate goal of this discussion. The discussion is loosely Wittgensteinian both in the sense that we want to play with the use of the word as Wittgenstein might, and that we want to consider what Wittgenstein himself
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(4)

had to say about evidence. Sufce it to say that these remarks are very preliminary, and I will in a variety of cases mark out a question or consideration without following it through to a denitive resolution. * * * A paradigmatic consideration of how we think and talk about evidence would juxtapose ethnographic and ethnological usages with those from other modes of speaking in which the notion of evidence is relevant, but relevant in distinctive ways. Speaking strictly with respect of the purpose of gathering evidence, for example, journalistic evidence is intended to verify the actuality of a situation, the veracity of an account, or the actuality of a statement. Historical evidence is used to determine the existence of temporal processes, social conditions at a certain period, or the content and sequence of events. Judicial evidence in criminal proceedings establishes motives or proves that a crime has been committed by a certain perpetrator. Experimental evidence is adduced in order to test hypotheses, whether in the spirit of verication or falsication. Statistical evidence is gathered to establish regularities between disparate domains by transforming or redescribing phenomena in numerical form subject to identical analytic operations. Ethnographic evidence is marshaled in order to identify cultural patterns and social arrangements, and ethnological evidence in order to identify regularities across cultures. One way this kind of paradigmatic analysis could proceed is to compare sentences belonging to each of these domains to see where they part company. Take for example the sentence Evidence was strewn about the house. This is not an ethnographic use of the term. But now think of the sentence Everything is evidence. There is a sense in anthropology in which the statement makes quite good sense, since one could regard everything as evidence for the existence of a particular cultural reality, a particular pattern. This is particularly striking if one compares doing ethnography in ones own culture and in a foreign culture. When I did my rst eldwork among Catholic Charismatics, mostly middle-class white North Americans, there were moments when I struggled to nd evidence of cultural patterns, practices, attitudes that distinguished them from other people of similar background including myself. When I later began work in Navajo society I was struck by the richness of ways in which difference and distinctiveness announced themselves, even in those domains in which Navajos were on the surface of things assimilated to the dominant North American culture. Miriam Rabelo (personal communication) offers a reection prompted by Gadamers critique of the notion of experience in the natural sciences in relation to how we sometimes use it in the social sciences, evidence then being grounded on the accumulation of experiences that start to repeat themselves, and thus conrm a pattern. She suggests that from Gadamers point of view evidence has to be thought of as itself produced through a hermeneutical experience, an experience that disappoints some of our preestablished expectations, forcing some change in the anthropologists own previous stance. The idea that evidence eventuates from redundancy to the point of saturation, or maybe sedimentation in the sense of condensing as a precipitate from within the epistemological eld, is important and links up with one of the other issues Im dealing with, which is the double meaning of evidence as evidence for a position and as that which is evident. The redundancy at issue here is not the kind that characterizes repeating the same
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CSORDAS Evidence of and for what?

experiment to see if the same results are obtained, nor that of manipulating experimental design in order to see if results are concordant in similar experiments. It is the redundancy of dipping into a river repeatedly and at different locations to determine whether the water is of the same quality with the same kind of sediments and minerals on a consistent basis. Then the kind of data exemplied by the famous statement Two Crows denies this is not evidence against the existence of the pattern. It does not reduce what was considered evidence to the status of mere opinion, nor does it indicate that the earlier evidence is wrong. It is in itself evidence that there exists a contradiction or the possibility of a contradiction, or that the pattern is not necessarily thoroughly generalizable through the eld of inquiry in question. * * * Let me turn to what I referred to as the syntagmatic consideration of evidence. Here we are thinking of evidence not so much as an idea on its own but in terms of how it ts with supporting concepts and concepts it supports in a syntagmatic chain such as the following sentence: Perception becomes data when it is used as evidence to establish facts, which are subsequently elevated to the status of truths and certainties.1 We can begin to deconstruct this sentence by noting rst that we would be unlikely to understand our own usage of evidence without reference to the entire set of terms including perception, data, evidence, fact, truth, certainty. I would note secondly that what I have just said exhibits a nominalist bias, insofar as I recited to you only the nouns in that sentence. I ignored the verbs become, use, establish, and elevate which call for the specication of processes rather than the proffering of denitions. I will neither claim that this is the only such sentence that could be offered, nor pretend to do all the work of analyzing this particular sentence, but will make several loosely connected observations relevant to our understandings of evidence in anthropology. Thus, insofar as its cornerstone is the notion of a fact, let us remind ourselves that this notion has a history, which has nicely been traced by Mary Poovey (1993) in her discussion of the origin of the modern fact. Poovey helps us to gain perspective on the incredible rhetorical sway exerted by numbers in contemporary science and civilization by tracing the origin of the modern fact virtually synonymous with the quantitative fact to no less an unglamourous source than the invention during the period of early mercantile capitalism of double-entry bookkeeping. Consider also how we use the terms data and evidence. I suggested a minute ago that in an alien society everything is evidence. It may have been more accurate to say that in an alien society everything is data; but is everything really evidence? Evidence has to be evidence of or for something, and that something is a hypothesis in the broadest sense. This is the difference between evidence and data. Data have nothing to prove in themselves, though they are distinct from mere perceptions in the assumption that they could be used to prove something. And the sense in which they are used to prove something must be different if we are asking, for example, for evidence of the existence or nature of a phenomenon (such as, for example, totemism or kinship), or evidence to test a hypothesis. Furthermore, the idea of evidence for the validity of a construct (say the habitus) or for the existence of a process (say globalization) may not make sense, since neither the habitus nor globalization are ontic entities but in fact ways of organizing data. So the
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(4)

evidence would be simply that the data can be organized under such rubrics or in a way consistent with them, and insofar as they either take into account more data than competing constructs or that they offer a compelling insight into a particular aspect of social life. And it cannot go without mention that the same evidence can be used to support different constructs. For example, I have for a long time argued that the way the notion of habit is deployed in practice theory and the notion of schema is deployed in cognitive anthropology are strictly analogous and refer to the same level of analysis of social life, but the grounding of one in behavior and the other in knowledge has signicant consequences for how we view the human world theoretically. It is possible to say All the evidence is pointing in a certain direction or toward a certain conclusion. It is also possible to say All the data are pointing in a certain direction or to a certain conclusion. But do they, or should they, mean the same thing? One can say The data are accumulating, and one can say The evidence is accumulating, and the two sentences appear to have roughly equivalent meanings. But to say The data are overwhelming means something quite different than to say The evidence is overwhelming. The former statement is purely quantitative and has the sense that there is too much data; the latter has the sense that the conclusion is incontrovertible, that there is a qualitative shift toward certitude. Accordingly, one cannot refer to the weight of the data in the same way that one can refer to the weight of the evidence, because the import of that weight is not about quantity but about a certain mass that assures that the balance has tipped toward facticity, and that is a metaphor for a cognitive shift. And here is another consideration: What is the difference between saying Look more closely and Gather more evidence? Does this imply a difference between a qualitative and a quantitative form of evidence? One might say Theres not a shred of evidence that this is the case. What if there was a shred of evidence? How does that affect ones stance toward the situation? Can a shred be a compelling shred? How many shreds does it take to make a case; or can one shred be regarded as a trace that can be followed in a promising direction? The issue may not be a quantitative one. Or perhaps the question is: What evidence will convince you that this is the case? In this case evidence is that which creates conviction, so how much evidence is needed to create how much conviction, and what is the relation between conviction and belief? Note that we already have a this which is the hypothesis. One would not want to say I have some evidence, but I dont know what its evidence of , for then how would one be able to call it evidence in the rst place? Still another dimension has to be determining the correspondence between levels of analysis and whether one is asking for explanation or description. The following uses of the term evidence are rather different: There is evidence that this society has a segmentary lineage system. There is evidence that devotees have the experience of being a deity during possession rituals. There is evidence that poverty causes social movements of either a political or religious nature.

We have to ask whether evidence is a relevant term when the goal is description? Description of what? If we already know the denition of what, then evidence is just lling in
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CSORDAS Evidence of and for what?

the blanks. Wittgenstein says At some point one has to pass from explanation to mere description (1969: 22e). It is interesting that he does not say reduced to mere description or that one must pass to gathering more evidence. One has the sense that in certain instances mere description is an advance over explanation. Along the same lines, in what sense can an event be taken as evidence, and can this be only when it is a typical event rather than a singular event? That is, would ethnographic use of the singular event have to be called something other than evidence? EvansPritchard talked about the granary falling on someone, but that was a typical event. Maurice Lienhardt reported his conversation in which the Canaque elder declared about the European contribution that You brought us the body, and that was a singular encounter. Both are implicated in instances of reasoning by vignette and provided great discursive purchase for both authors, but they are dissimilar in their degree of generality. Likewise we can ask in what sense can a statement, a case study, or a life history be taken as evidence does it depend entirely on the stage of investigation and where the statement can be tted in with whatever else we know? As Wittgenstein observes parenthetically at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, the most explicit expression of intention is by itself insufcient evidence of intention (1958: 165e). This is true at least in the sense that there are times at which our statements of intention are meant to convince ourselves of our own intention as much as to state them outright. So what is the transformative moment at which a piece of data becomes transformed into evidence? * * * I want to make one more move to take us beyond the paradigmatic and syntagmatic discussion of evidence we have pursued so far. Wittgenstein suggests that in certain situations a distinction becomes relevant between what he calls imponderable evidence and documentary evidence. His example is that in contrast to color-blindness, which can be established as an empirical phenomenon based on concordance of color judgments among those diagnosed as normal, there is no such general agreement over the question whether an expression of feeling is genuine or not (1958: 227e). Wittgenstein appears to agree with the statement that The genuineness of an expression cannot be proved; one has to feel it (1958: 228e), but insists that the consequences of recognizing this genuineness are of a diffuse kind incapable of general formulation, and yielding at best what looks like the fragments of a system (1958: 228e). For Wittgenstein, Imponderable evidence includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone (1958: 228e). To be sure, there have been empirical attempts to document type of glance, gesture, and tone, as well as to classify rules for their use, but Wittgenstein is concerned with genuineness, and here a certain indeniteness inevitably remains, that although there are rules they do not form a system. The question he leaves us with is what does imponderable evidence accomplish? (1958: 228e). We have to take the specic example of judgments about the genuineness of a feeling or expression of a feeling as pointing to a kind of imponderability that is more generally relevant for anthropology. In the nal analysis Correcter prognoses will generally issue from the judgments of those with better knowledge of mankind (Wittgenstein, 1958: 227e). This is not an elitist position, for such knowledge can be learned. And it is a concern with, or rather the willingness to recognize the existence and relevance of, such evidence that is anthropologys contribution to the human sciences. There is a
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 4(4)

passage in Veena Dass thoughtful essay elaborating the relevance of Wittgenstein to anthropology in which she observes that an anthropological text is marked by a certain kind of excess or a certain surplus (1998: 179). She sees this as an excess of description that expresses equally the distrust of formal rules and obligations as sources of social order or moral judgment (1998: 179) and leads to the doorstep of Wittgensteins concern with forms of life and language games. In the terms we are using here, it is not simply an excess of description but the inlling of ethnographic space with imponderable evidence that is at issue. Consideration of the kind of imponderable evidence that allows us to judge the genuineness of a feeling leads us directly to the critically important double meaning of evidence. In one sense evidence establishes fact in a situation of uncertainty. In another sense evidence is that which is evident, even self-evident and hence immediately, unmediatedly certain. We must understand imponderable evidence in the latter sense. And here we can be helped by a brief look at Husserl. Husserl began from the Cartesian position, in which the primary evidence was I think. For Descartes this evidence was sufcient to draw a conclusion that in his view could serve as a ground for positive science. Husserl was equally determined to ground positive science, but was far more radical, for beginning with the observation I think, he proceeded to ask further, What is the nature and content of my thought of what and how I am thinking? Husserls phenomenology is thus a radical interrogation of consciousness, which must be the site of objectivity if there is to be any. And for Husserl philosophy was included as part of science, just as we can say that anthropology is part of science, but in a way rather different than is proclaimed by various ideologues of scientism. Wittgensteins goals are in fact in accord with Husserls desire to, in the words of Quentin Lauer, attain to a being given in such a way that the impossibility of it being otherwise imposes itself on consciousness (Lauer, 1967: 150). The intention of meaning that links a conscious subject and the state of affairs expressed in language which I think describes the realm of imponderable evidence is not illusory when veried by an intuition, wherein an object or state of affairs is not simply intended but rendered, so to speak, bodily present or present-in-itself to the consciousness that intends it. When the object intended and the object given in an intuition are identical, and the conscious subject is aware of the identication, the object, or better still the proposition, is evident, its intention has been fullled (Lauer, 1967: 1523). For Husserl the fulllment that results in an essential intuition is the result not of imponderables but of radical reduction of the contents of consciousness to a kernel, and in response to the objection that it is possible to propose contradictory essential intuitions, he responds that one genuine essential intuition cannot contradict another (Husserl, 1967: 155). Apparent contradiction would have to be accounted for by the phenomenon not being quite the same, or being considered on different levels of analysis, or not sufciently rationalized or reduced. In fact, Lauer observes that in contrast to the positivist doctrine that essences are unknowable, Husserl would say exactly the opposite: that only essences are knowable at all. We know to the extent that we grasp essences. Beyond this we opine (Lauer, 1967: 157). This is rigor indeed, for it means that we should accept as evident only what presents itself to consciousness with the same immediacy as does the cogito (Lauer, 1967: 1534). In my reading, for Husserl, evidence is only adequate when it presents itself to consciousness as self-evident, and self-evidence is closely related to insight, which has at its center
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CSORDAS Evidence of and for what?

the unity of a rational positing with that which essentially motivates it (Husserl, 1967: 161). I will not elaborate Husserls distinctions between experiencing meaning in the mode of the intuitive and the mode of the embodied, between assertoric and apodeictic self-evidence, and between adequate and inadequate self-evidence. Sufce it to say that self-evidence or insight is literally a seeing-into that poses challenges for ethnography, not the least among which is that it perhaps sets an impossibly high standard of evidence. We might readily recognize the claim that all meaning is positional, and even that the appearing of a thing is rationally motivated by its positionality. But we might have reservations about the manner in which Husserls theory privileges the sensory model of vision when this privilege has been criticized as ethnocentric, or with the way he suggests that insight excludes Otherness when what we want is to place Otherness in a variety of senses at the center of our problematic, or yet again with the argument that rational technique allows a progressive harmonious lling out of meaning when we want to retain and celebrate indeterminacy in incompletion in social life. What we can take from Husserl in order to combine it with the insights drawn from Wittgenstein is the recognition that not only is there a basic kind of meaning or position that corresponds phenomenologically to every category of object including those of anthropology, but also that there is a basic kind of primordial dator-consciousness of such meaning, and, pertaining to it, a basic type of primordial self-evidence (1967: 166). Awareness of variations among kinds of consciousness and types of self-evidence does not have to take the form of reexivity of the kind that characterized the methodological crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. It does require that we be vigilant about the necessity to constantly triangulate and monitor the relationships among kinds of meaning, consciousness, and self-evidence as we pursue our anthropological goals. To sum this all up in a single statement, we must recognize explicitly that the problem of evidence is in essence a problem of speech in relation to experience.
Acknowledgements

This article was originally prepared for a panel on Anthropological Evidence and its Culture organized by Richard Fox and sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for the annual meetings of the AAA in 2003. I am grateful to Steve Reyna and Richard Wilson for inviting me to submit the article for publication in Anthropological Theory.
Note

1 Veritude is impersonal/objective and certitude is personal/subjective. Something can be true without being certain, but can it be certain without being true? The word certain not only connotes absolute certainty but specicity, and yet it has the vagary of being able to be used as specic but unspecied, as in une femme dun certain age or under certain conditions.
References

Das, Veena (1998) Wittgenstein and Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 17195. Husserl, Edmund (1967) Phenomenology of Reason, in Joseph Kockelmans (ed.) Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretations, pp. 15866. New York: Doubleday.
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Lauer, Quentin (1967) On Evidence, in Joseph Kockelmans (ed.) Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretations, pp. 1507. New York: Doubleday. Poovey, Mary (1993) A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical Investigations (translated by G.E.M. Anscombe). New York: MacMillan. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969) On Certainty. New York: Harper.
THOMAS J. CSORDAS is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include anthropological theory, comparative religion, psychological and medical anthropology, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture. He has served as Editor of Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology (19962001), and as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (19982002). Among his publications are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); (edited) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; paperback edn Palgrave 2002); and Body/Meaning/Healing (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

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