Ethnography and applied metaphysics

Previous articleNext article FreeBook SymposiumEthnography and applied metaphysics Daston, Lorraine. 2019. Against nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Judith FarquharJudith FarquharUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLorraine Daston is a precious natural resource for anthropology. Her philosophical voice, both poetic and leisurely, and her stunning erudition, have long inspired me and many intellectual comrades. Her generous writing has helped us frame new questions and craft new modes of attention to take to the places near and far where we do fieldwork. This is partly because she is not afraid to think along with metaphysics—an area of concern usually quite remote from anthropology’s concrete and empirical thought style, yet challenging to it.One of Daston’s books, Biographies of scientific objects, for example, eschews “pure metaphysics,” the “ethereal world of what is always and everywhere from a God’s-eye-viewpoint,” in favor of applied metaphysics. Applied metaphysics is, I want to argue, much like what we anthropologists and some of our wisest interlocutors do. An applied metaphysics studies “the dynamic world of what emerges and disappears from the horizon of [in Daston’s usual cases] working scientists” (Daston 2000: 1). However oxymoronic the term may sound, this mode of attention makes a sophisticated ontological turn. Perhaps some in philosophy have been there since the pre-Socratics, but most anthropology lacked an ontological focus on “what is” for a working world until writers like Daston came along to help us. (Indeed, I know from personal experience, after a few days spent with Lorraine in Beijing, how curious she is about every thing, really truly asking what is for this place and time.)In Against nature, Daston shows us that the thought of bygone worlds can still open up new views on things we too easily take as naturally given, everywhere. Our best philosophy, and especially the metaphysical corners of it, reads through such pluralities, eventually landing on rather absolute, or singular, statements. This is the proper style of the metaphysical claim to depth. Universal truths, freshly articulated, are powerful tools of thought. They demand that we recognize something surprising, perhaps something repressed, about our lives. They impress us as true while they challenge conventions of common sense.Though Daston is extremely careful to avoid unfounded absolute statements, Against nature is no exception to the rhetorical style of philosophical metaphysics. We learn, for example, that a natural order and a moral order are “naturally” counterposed: “For Martians and angels, order might just be, requiring no representation. But for our species, with our sensorium, order must be grasped and imagined, both literally and figuratively. ... The human impulse to make nature meaningful is rooted in a double insight about order: normativity demands order; and nature supplies exemplars of all conceivable orders (pp. 59–60). Note that “nature” here is singular, as is “the human impulse.”In a (cultural) anthropological reading, a universalist rhetoric using words like “our species,” “must be,” “the human impulse,” and “all conceivable orders” stimulates, almost always, the prickly retort, “But [humph! I can authoritatively state...] not in my village!” We ethnographers take our greatest pleasure in knowing and writing about different systems, even as we challenge both difference and system in theory. Even anthropologists in China, my friends who can take a bus or train to their field sites with urban migrant laborers or county town educators, cross a certain social divide in their work of cultural translation. In my village, the ethnographer is tempted to protest, Chinese has no word for nature-over-against-culture, so how can a deployment of “nature” as part of a universal human drive toward [cultural] meaning be counted as everywhere at work? More specifically, do “we” humans really, everywhere and always, require that a singular order be “grasped and imagined” (p. 59)?Unfortunately for our fragile ethnographic authority, however, the “not in my village” objection no longer persuades. It’s not only that villages are no longer—if they ever were—islands containing distinct social and functional systems. Very few of us these days are able to find a deep-rooted and self-contained “village” inviting us to write down its “culture.” Mass-mediated globalization has rewritten all the isolated lives I once yearned to know as difference. In China, a hard-won near-universal literacy has delivered all the terms of the modern constitution to almost everyone.Rather than struggle either to recuperate, or to banish forever the “not in my village” protest against philosophy, then, I want to complete my appreciation of Against nature with a reflection on lessons learned from another philosophical anthropologist, a Sichuanese (Qiang ethnicity) herbalist who welcomed my coinvestigator Lili Lai and me—bearing our philosophical anthropology questions from our big city studies—into his home and practice for a few days. His story gains special significance after a reading of Daston: unlike so many healers and forest ramblers we got to know in southern China between 2010 and 2015, he liked to talk about Nature and humans’ relationship to Nature.Lili and I were surprised to hear Dr. Li (a pseudonym) invoke “Nature” so often in our conversations. Perhaps he felt that as intellectual urbanites working hand-in-glove with the Chinese state, we needed to be educated about how a healer could live in harmony with the particular mountains and forests, plants and animals of his home in northern Sichuan. When we met him, he had survived the catastrophic 2008 Wenchuan earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed his grand family compound in the forests, and scarred the land throughout the region with muddy landslides. Dr. Li chose a word, Nature, that he thought we would understand, though none of us could be sure after the earthquake that Nature had any benign, much less meaningful order. Nature in Wenchuan, even today, is highly unreliable.The word he used for Nature (which I capitalize when it denotes that great Other of Culture that we all inherited with the modern constitution) was da ziran 大自然. I have in the past been tempted to translate this not as capital-N Nature but as “the great self-so” or “the great spontaneity.” Perhaps Dr. Li was also working with this Daoist sense of that ancient word, ziran. But I hesitate to consign his thinking to some premodern classic philosophy rubric. In this respect, I think he is amodern, along with all the rest of us.Why did he invoke Nature, then, as he spoke of his life lived in harmony with da ziran? Of course, it is philosophy like Daston’s that even occasioned our interest in this question. Or perhaps I should say it was the relationship between a (Western-derived) applied metaphysics and the “not in my village” impulse of field anthropology that helped us hear Dr. Li’s deployment of Nature as both a globalized metanarrative (Lyotard 1984) and a very local worldview.Opening up the complexity of his vision and his rhetoric requires some background to our meeting and conversations. We were introduced to Dr. Li as a Qiang folk herbalist who was widely known as an effective herbal medicine doctor. When we first saw him, he was working from a small clinic in the county hospital, several hours by car downhill from his family’s destroyed mountain compound. The hospital director had asked him to “come down” to the county town and set up this practice after the devastation of the earthquake. “I was hoping to relieve the suffering of so many injured people,” Dr. Li said. With this remark, he was adopting a position from within the human-centered ethics of modern secular medicine. To recall Daston’s formulation, with so many dead and injured, he made a decision to devote his attention especially to “human reason in human bodies” (p. 69).Working from his hospital clinic, Dr. Li dispensed herbal formulas using natural drugs, mostly botanicals, that he and his family members had collected and processed themselves. He and his disciple (his youngest son) were kept very busy. The waiting room for the clinic was always jammed with hopeful patients. Why, we wondered? We tried the usual appreciative flattery: “What makes you such a good healer, Dr. Li? What is the secret of your personal power?” Dr. Li scoffed at our sycophantic language: “Any doctor can do well,” he said, “all they need is herbs that do well” (医生都得行,只要药得行就得行). (Chinese speakers will note that this is not a reference to moral goodness or even to “good” skills; rather for Dr. Li it seems to be a question of “achieving effectiveness” [得行] within the ethical undertaking of medicine.)Wanting to show us more concretely the sources of his power to “do well,” Dr. Li and his son invited us to spend a weekend in mountain hamlets near the old homestead, studying the plants growing in the ruins of the old stone house and in the forest around it. Together with a botanical pharmacologist who had come with us, we all puzzled over the proper name and properties of an unknown plant, admired wild lingzhi fungi in situ, and marveled at another son’s luck in cultivating a rare tuber (fritillary) in a forest plot farther up the slopes. Wandering in those post-traumatic mountain groves, Dr. Li waxed philosophical. What struck us most was his intimacy with the plants in and around his home, and the way he spoke in that setting of respecting Nature. One thing he constantly mentioned to our botanist companion was “everything given to us by Nature can be medicine.” He also spoke to her expert status by insisting, “science is limitless, but so are herbs.” In his reference to science one can hear his (a)modernism talking. But I think he meant “limitless” in a particularly literal and not very familiar sense: science and herbs are fields without borders. They interpenetrate and interact but they cannot be thought of as discrete systems that are bounded in any sense. Dr. Li recognizes “bad science,” scorning the shallow classifications and protocol-driven practice of hospital pharmacies; but he values the many forms of experiential knowledge that can contribute to a “limitless” Science.In the same way, “everything given to us by nature can be medicine,” if only we could figure out how to determine the uses of things thus far unknown. Research, in field and forest, is our ongoing task as scientists. But Science—I think Dr. Li would capitalize kexue 科学 in English—could stand to be more humble before the myriad powers of Nature. Dr. Li was, after all, speaking as a medical man who had long been matching the qualities of forest products to the expressions of disease in humans. And he was very aware of the limitations of his understanding.These few remarks of Dr. Li’s take us to the ancient metaphysics that is applied in the language and practice of traditional medicines in China. Dr. Li had not, literally, read the natural philosophers of early China—he was supposedly illiterate, despite knowing so much—but he was nevertheless an heir through language of a worldview that distinguishes his “Nature” from the Natures in which most modernists traffic, and which Daston describes for us. I cannot represent his thinking here, but Against nature takes us part of the way toward understanding it, albeit with no reference to a Chinese history of applied metaphysics.To wit: Daston’s Chapter 2, on “specific natures,” had me scribbling ancient Chinese terms, still used in medicine, into the margins: especially xing 性. This xing is glossed in my online Chinese-English dictionary as “(1) nature; (2) character, disposition; (3) property, quality.”1 Better philosophers than I have reflected at length on this “ontological identity card” (p. 7) or “inner principle” (p. 9) that is the defining character of every thing.2 The early Chinese classics treat the concept xing as a name for the intrinsic nature of each one of the myriad things, the wanwu 万物. This world’s myriad entities emerge as particulars from the endless cosmogonic Becoming that is da ziran, the great spontaneity. Though the cosmogonic link between being and becoming that is the notion of intrinsic xing nature for Chinese thought does not figure in Daston’s chapter, some of the words she has given us resonate with this dynamism. She reminds us, for example, that for many ancients, things strive in directions; they have active propensities, as François Jullien has shown through Chinese aesthetics (Jullien 1995). And most of all, for medical science in East Asia, natural drugs have xing, and symptomatic expressions have xing. The trick (or the science) for the doctor is to match and juxtapose these propensities in a way that can “do well” for the patient.Daston could be ventriloquizing Dr. Li with her lovely summary, “species natures ... carry nestled within themselves the essence and the narrative of their being” (p. 10). Dr. Li spoke of the “herbs” through which he managed to practice effective healing for humans as things with intrinsic qualities or powers. The medicine he practiced had a metaphysical foundation that he did not need to explain to us: all things emerge into being on specific trajectories, they cooperate with the powers of some other things and act against the dispositions of other things. Why can “everything given to us by nature become medicine?” Because the array of specific natures among the wanwu can counter the specific natures of, not humans tout court, not individuals as whole persons, but those specific phenomena that make us humans suffer. Lingzhi mushroom can counter the growth of a tumor, fritillary bulb can break up the phlegm in your chest.In closing, I turn to speculations of a “not in my village” sort: these limitless natural capacities that Dr. Li enlists in the service of his unbounded science are not—pace Daston—features of a structured order of nature, one that could be compared with and serve as resource for a moral order or social structure. Nor must the myriad things striving toward efficacy in Dr. Li’s forests and clinics be made meaningful as a singular macro-order (Nature) distinct from the moral order. The natures known to the philosophers of local medicines in East Asia are irreducibly plural. As anthropologists we must forever leave behind the two great modernist singulars of Nature and Culture. The natures with which we seek to live in harmony can still be made meaningful, they can even, in the hands of a clinical scientist, “do well” for suffering humans. But they come into being in myriads that are impossible for our sensorium to grasp or finally represent.Notes1. From the mobile phone app, Pleco.2. A few modern philosophers who have explored cosmogony and xing—those who have especially influenced me—are Roger Ames, Feng Youlan, A. C. Graham, François Jullien, Joseph Needham, Zhang Dong, and Zhang Qicheng.ReferencesDaston, Lorraine. 2000. Biographies of scientific objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarJullien, François. 1995. The propensity of things: Toward a history of efficacy in China. New York: Zone Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarLyotard, Jean François. 1984. The post-modern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarJudith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book, coauthored with Lili Lai, from the University of Chicago Press, is Gathering medicines: Nation and knowledge in China’s mountain south.Judith Farquhar[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 11, Number 2Autumn 2021 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/716596 © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 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Epistemology · Ethnography · Metaphysics · Sociology · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy

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