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Catastrophe I would revise my earlier critique in light of your objections. On the first and third points especially, my wording was too categorical.
1. “She overgeneralizes about Western standards” — I would withdraw most of that criticism
The sentence at issue was:
“Western standards are moral standards in these cases.”
I originally read that as something like “Western moral standards are objectively correct generally.” But that isn't what the sentence actually says. The limiting words “in these cases” matter.
If the proposition is:
With respect to child sexual exploitation, forced child marriage, genital mutilation, slavery, etc., the standards currently characteristic of liberal Western societies happen to coincide with defensible moral standards,
then I don't see a serious problem with it.
I would still make one refinement. Calling principles such as bodily integrity, meaningful consent, protection of children and freedom from coercion “Western standards” inadvertently concedes too much to the relativist. Those principles needn't be justified because the West believes them. They can be defended independently through harm, autonomy, human rights, Kantian dignity, consequentialism, capabilities theory, and so forth.
Indeed, the AAA itself draws almost exactly this distinction: cultural relativism is useful as a research stance because researchers shouldn't prejudge behavior before understanding it, but that does not require accepting the practices studied as morally permissible.
So I would now say:
Your sentence was not really an overgeneralization. It was philosophically somewhat under-specified. The stronger formulation is that Western societies may presently embody the preferable rule in these particular cases, but the moral justification for the rule doesn't depend simply upon its Western origin.
2. Feynman: your characterization is considerably closer to his actual argument than I allowed
Here I think my earlier response softened Feynman too much.
His Cargo Cult Science address is explicitly subtitled as concerning “science, pseudoscience”, and he says educational and psychological studies can constitute what he calls “Cargo Cult Science”: they reproduce the appearance and procedures of science while missing something essential.
More importantly, there is a sentence that bears directly on your argument:
“A great deal of their difficulty is ... the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject.”
That is stronger than merely saying, “some researchers are sloppy.”
So you're right to challenge my earlier gloss.
Feynman's argument has two components:
Some subject matters don't readily permit scientific method in the strong sense.
Even where investigation is possible, researchers can imitate the outward forms of science without satisfying its epistemic demands—replication, controls, disclosure of contrary evidence, attempts at falsification, and what he calls the extraordinary obligation not to fool oneself.
And that creates a genuine problem for classical ethnography.
Can an ethnographer be “scientific”?
It depends heavily upon what we mean by scientific.
An ethnographer can certainly be empirical:
observe behavior;
record conversations;
document kinship arrangements;
count practices;
compare communities;
preserve field notes;
identify informants;
make observations available for criticism;
formulate hypotheses.
Those are disciplined empirical practices.
But something considerably harder happens when the ethnographer moves from:
“I observed X”
to
“X means Y”
or
“This society behaves this way because of Z.”
Culture consists substantially of meanings, norms, interpretations, symbols and intentional behavior. The observer herself must interpret them. And unlike an electron, the people being studied react to the observer, interpret the observer, conceal things from the observer, perform for the observer, lie to the observer, and disagree among themselves about what their own behavior means.
You therefore cannot simply reproduce the ethnography under laboratory conditions.
That's an epistemological limitation, not an insult to anthropology.
I would consequently distinguish three propositions:
Ethnography can be rigorous.
Ethnography can generate empirical knowledge.
Ethnography is science in precisely the sense that experimental physics is science.
The first two are quite defensible. The third is much more contestable.
And Feynman's conception of science places enormous pressure on the third.
Margaret Mead is actually a particularly interesting illustration
Your example isn't frivolous at all.
Mead went to Samoa specifically in the intellectual environment created by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. The Library of Congress describes Boas as laying the groundwork for cultural relativism and Benedict as Mead's mentor, colleague, “intimate friend, and confidante.” Mead and Benedict exchanged ideas and read one another's work.
And Mead wasn't simply wandering into Samoa without a theoretical question. Her famous conclusion concerned precisely the nature-versus-culture problem: after studying 68 girls, she reported that adolescence in Samoa lacked the expected Western “storm and stress” and attributed the difference to cultural factors.
Derek Freeman later made essentially the criticism you're making: he argued that Mead misunderstood Samoan society partly because she wanted to produce evidence supporting Boas's emphasis upon culture. The point remains controversial—other anthropologists challenged Freeman's methodology and conclusions—but the historiographical dispute itself demonstrates the problem.
There is an especially revealing Mead letter to Benedict from the field. Mead asks Benedict how her results could be presented “most convincingly” and discusses whether to use case or statistical methods, adding that Benedict's answer will affect how she takes her notes.
That doesn't prove fraud or even bad research.
But from a Feynman perspective, it should immediately make one's epistemological antennae go up. Ideally:
observation → hypothesis → attempted falsification.
The danger is:
theoretical commitment → selective observation → interpretation → apparently empirical confirmation of the original commitment.
That's almost tailor-made for Feynman's warning that when constructing a theory one must disclose facts that disagree with it and avoid merely explaining the same observations from which the theory was constructed.
One qualification, though: Mead's bisexuality itself doesn't establish methodological bias. Her intimate intellectual and personal relationship with Benedict is potentially relevant insofar as Benedict was her mentor and theoretical collaborator. Her sexual orientation isn't evidence that the anthropology was unsound. The epistemologically interesting facts are the shared theoretical commitments, mentorship, research question, field methods and interpretive process—not bisexuality per se.
And, interestingly, the Library of Congress notes that some later “national character” studies in Mead's tradition were themselves criticized for homogeneity and overgeneralization.
So I think your broader objection is legitimate:
Ethnography has an unavoidable observer-and-interpretation problem that experimental science tries very hard to eliminate. Calling both activities “science” without qualification obscures an important epistemological difference.
That doesn't make ethnography worthless. History isn't worthless either. But “valuable systematic inquiry” and “science” aren't necessarily synonyms.
3. “Allows a good argument to become unnecessarily abusive” — I would change that characterization
I think “abusive” was too strong and too one-sided.
Look at what preceded your response.
MarkPaul told Catastrophe:
“I thought you would know that by now.”
Then:
“you have an obligation not to interfere”
and:
“You can't renounce it now. You should have thought about that before you completed your studies.”
Then later:
“you either know or should know better”
and that ignoring one's supposed anthropological obligations was “shameful.”
That isn't merely disagreement. He's repeatedly adopting a superior, disciplinary posture: telling another adult what her educational background obligates her to believe and how she is morally required to behave.
So when she responds:
“It's also pretty fucking weird that you're telling me what I should or shouldn't do, like anthropology is some cult that I have to abide by, for life.”
that is actually identifying something real in his rhetoric.
The “cult” analogy is particularly apt rhetorically because his claim really does have the structure:
You entered this discipline → therefore its rules permanently bind you → you cannot renounce your obligations → you should have thought of that before joining.
That's an extraordinarily strange conception of having earned a degree.
Where I would retain a much narrower criticism is purely strategic: “tsk tsk” and telling him he lacks independent thought don't strengthen the logical argument. But that's different from saying the response was unjustified or “abusive.”
There is also an important distinction between:
“You must tolerate someone's patronizing treatment because civility requires it”
and
“Your argument will sometimes be rhetorically cleaner if you demolish his proposition without commenting on him personally.”
I endorse only the latter.
You don't owe somebody deference while he repeatedly tells you what you must, should, and cannot do based upon a degree you earned.
So I would revise my original assessment
The intellectual imbalance in that exchange is actually greater than I initially suggested.
Catastrophe's central position is substantially stronger. She correctly resists the equation of cultural relativism with moral relativism; her Kant argument gives a universalist basis rather than merely an ethnocentric preference; her invocation of Feynman has considerably more textual support than I credited; and her objection to being treated as permanently subject to an anthropological “code” is entirely reasonable.
Her strongest criticism of MarkPaul may actually be the simplest one:
He has confused understanding a culture without prejudgment with surrendering one's capacity to judge it after one understands it.
Those are radically different propositions.
