Saturday, May 21, 2011
Biased towards, biased away fromCategories: Anthropology
I’m learning so much. I really appreciate being able to see things from two points of view.
Archaeology professes to be a science, to seek to apply scientific methods to its investigations. In many important ways it accomplishes this. But I am also aware that bias is always going to be a factor. For example, there are so many collections of so many different kinds of artefacts, and people wonder why another collection in a museum is going to make any difference. Why not use those old collections? But collections involve agendas, preferences, interests and a great number of things not collected. It is not easy to discover how a collection has been curated, what the preferences or biases were at the time of collection. And if you decide to perform some kind of scientific analysis on that collection, you cant be sure that it contains everything that you would have chosen to include, given your research question.
Anthropology, well, I find it hard to say that anthropology is a science. I know that many people do say that. My early introductions to anthropology were focused on political analyses of science and its relationship to power. Anthropology really is the only avenue for examining science. I would prefer to put anthropology in a box all of its own. Bias is inherent, but recognised. For me, the essence of anthropology is the tools it provides for changing the cultural lenses that we perceive the world through, tools for letting go of the cultural baggage, tools for understanding that this is the way we do things around here these days (now that I work in archaeology, I have to add that little ‘these days’ at the end). You cant do that without getting close to people, without picking up their biases.
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