The history of our discipline was always characterized by the constant attempt to linguistically and intellectually plunder terms and concepts from other disciplines, concepts that we thought “good to think with”, with the only goal of trying to better understand the polymorphic and always changing social aspect of human life. At the dawn of our life, biology gave us terms as “system” and “evolution”, as linguistics gave Levi-Strauss the inspiration for the gigantic intellectual enterprise of the structural anthropology.
During his seminar, professor Roberto Malighetti often quoted the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in relation to the fact (or the interpretation?) anthropological observation cannot be a neutral act and, therefore, our presence in the field always changes the reality we are observing (and also thought us to deal with the term “reality” in a real problematic way).
And so, when he ended the seminar with the last question: “so, what is the (ethnographic) field?”, I was still wondering whether and how contemporary physics could help us in some way to answer to this theoretical question and which concepts can we borrow to think with.
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| Representation of a field in Physics |
The philosophy of the XX century has clearly a debt towards Physics and especially to the revolution started by Einstein and the School of Copenhagen in the first half of the century: the Heisenberg principle, for example, helped us a lot in reformulating one of the perennial topic of the western philosophy, namely the relationship between subject and object, which have come to be seen as no more separate things (Descartes’s dualism), but like realities that constitute reciprocally each other.
If Heidegger said that knowing (and “observing” as the primary modern scientific act of knowing) is a mode of “being-in-the-world”, the Heisenberg principle, from a phenomenological perspective, is a physical demonstration of it.
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| Representation of a kinship system |
But let’s go with order. Firstly, what is a field in Physics? Classically speaking, a field is a region in which each point is affected by a force (encyclopedia Britannica), but also in which every object produces a force. Let’s think about gravity: the earth is in the gravitational field of the sun, but it has its own gravitational field that attracts the moon (and even the sun itself!). So, if every object creates a field, the whole spacetime is populated by a continuum of forces capable of influencing each other, as well as the objects.
Hence, first of all, if we apply the metaphor of the physical field to the ethnographic one, we get two observations, a theoretical one and a very practical one. The theoretical one is that the field is not made just by observable “objects” (people, materials and natural components), but also by “invisible” (for use “cultural”, “political”, etc…) forces that act upon and in the field itself, and, moreover, that, when we physically enter the field, we are going to influence and be influenced by these forces, at a degree that depends, as well, on the “position” we decide to take in the field.
The second, very practical one, is that the first things we need to be aware of, when entering a field, are which the forces that act upon and in the field are and who/what “produces” them, in Physics it can be similar to “consider variables”.
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| Heisenberg's representation of the atom |
Quantum mechanics has given us other two concepts which, I think, are for us “good to think with”: uncertainty and probability.
If we compare the representation of the atom given by Bohr in 1913 (in which the atom is represented as a “kind of miniature solar system”) with the one given by Heisenberg, in the latter orbitals, are regions of probability or more specifically, the probability of finding an electron at that position: instead of drawing an electron as a point in the space, like a planet going around the sun, it is only possible to draw a volume of the space in which an electron can be found 95% of the time.
Applying this concept to ethnography, our field becomes, first of all, a region of the space created by a question (in physics “where is the electron?”). The answer to this question can be both representational and interpretative, but it is always probabilistic. We are used to calling this probability “agency”, namely the “capacity of a subject not be in the place where he/she is supposed to be (and in the way he/she supposed to be)”.
Open brackets: What if we started to think, for example, kinship structures not as descriptive diagrams, but the probability of finding a member of a given society in a certain relation with the other members? – close brackets.
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| Levi Strauss's representation of a Bororo's village |
So, feeding our mind with this concept, we have come to the following conclusion: subjectively speaking, the field is that precise spacetime portion we need to, or we are able to observe in order to answer our questions. The subjective field represents, as well, the moment of the “Cogito”, the part of our research before (and partly after) the field: the moment in which we think ourselves as subjects separated by the object, the moment of which we question the “otherness”.
Phenomenologically speaking, during (mainly, but not only) the fieldwork, an anthropological field is a region in which each point (human and non-human) is affected by a force (human and non-human). It exists independently by the presence of the ethnographer, who deliberately decide to enter the field, causing inevitably a perturbation of the same field. Therefore, the representation or the interpretation that the ethnographer will give of the field will have a probabilistic nature and it will be inevitably affected by the choices it will make, not only because “you cannot observe the speed and the position of an electron at the same time”, but because the position it takes in the field will allow him to interact differently with the objects and the forces that act in and upon the field. The ethnography that we are going to write, can be, as well, conceptualize as an object that will have a force that will impact on the field (the physical entanglement will allow us also to explain, in the economy of this metaphor, the effect despite the distance), and the results of this force will depend on different factors (as the “social mass” that our book will have…). It is in the not entirely predictable nature of our ethnography’s force, that all the questions of “what can/must be said and what can not/must not be said” find their roots.
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| The 4 fundamental forces in Physics |
Coherently with the perspective, we are here discussing, we can also answer the very last question professor Malighetti addressed us: what are the limits of the field?
The limit of the field depends mainly by 7 factors: the question of the ethnographer; the “nature” and the “culture” of the ethnographer (I have no space for discussing the choice of these two terms); the forces that are already present in the field and that act on the field from the outside (from conflicts to religions, to social religions; from the relationship of political or economic domination to also the possibility of having a research VISA); the extent and the kind of the force the ethnographer can display to contrast or to favor the forces already present in the field (for sure, having a colonial army by your side creates a very different situation); the position the ethnographer decides to take in the field (that he/she is able to take or that he/she thinks he/she should take in order to answer his/her question); the physical possibly of movement in space and time of the ethnographer; and… the chance, the randomness, the physical paradox of the Schrödinger’s cat: in a field of objects and forces (where a flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane) the unexpected and the uncontrollable are always key factors to take into account.
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| Bourdieu's 4 forms of capital |
Even though the idea of the anthropology as the quantum physics of the society is as intriguing (at least for me) as “Comtian” (August Comte said that sociology will be the physics of the social), humans are not electrons, and even though genetics is more and more nagging in reminding us of our biological bases, we are always historically and "artificially" constructed: our life is culturally, politically, socially, psychologically (and so on…)played. That’s why human beings are only influenced and not determined by the social forces in the space, and as strong as the forces are, most of the time we have more than the 5% of chances to “not be in the place where he/she is supposed to be”.
Nevertheless, we are unavoidably a linguistic cannibal science, who need to be constantly fed with terms coming from other sciences and from our fields. And I think that, even though I agree with Evans-Pritchard that “anthropology is a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy or art”, hard science (especially contemporary ones), if used responsibly, can still be useful to our theoretical reflection. If a concept has an intellectual “mass”, we can easily turn it into energy, following Einstein’s famous equation, to keep on giving energy to our cultural mission: keep on studying and understanding the polymorphic way in which men are cultural animals.
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