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Two minds

Two minds

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of February 24, 2025 (Week 1)

Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/1

Welcome to the great conversation

Hello and welcome to ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology

• I am Ryan Schram
• This class has a Canvas site with information about the whole class (including the quiz in Week 3).

What kind of a class is ANTH 2700?

There are different kinds of required or “core” classes you take at a university:

• The “survey” class. It covers a new topic and completely different body of research each week. It’s a mile wide and an inch deep.
• The “foundations” class. It presents all of the Big Ideas, usually from the early days of the field, and covers the history of the field (with a week on 1990s–2010s at the end called “new approaches.”)
• The “junk drawer” class. It includes all the required topics that future teachers, advisors, employers, and credentialing bodies will want a student to know. It may also be the place where a faculty puts an important, required kind of work or assignment.

ANTH 2700 does not belong to any of these types of classes.

It has elements of all three, but it has a different aim and purpose.

This class aims

• to initiate each of you into a conversation among anthropologists, and
• to enable each of you to figure out where you stand on open questions that anthropologists continue to discuss with other anthropologists, and other people who care about those questions.

The weekly online check-in for class

For the first time ever, I will be tracking who comes to lecture.

Attendance is not part of your grade in this class. You don’t need to make up an absence if you miss a class, and you are not “required” to come to class any more than you are already required to attend classes.

We will use a QR code on the Student Relationship Engagement System (SRES) so that everyone can check in and say how they are doing.

What does anthropology mean to you?

Let’s talk. Get up and look around. Greet the people in the class. Say hi, and ask each other what anthropology means to you.

Use this Mentimeter page to share your ideas: https://www.menti.com/alxjqra569jw.

You can also go to https://menti.com and type in code 6534 8449.

• What do you associate with anthropology?
• How do you explain anthropology (the major) to your friends and family?
• What makes anthropology different from sociology, or any other field?

Add your ideas. Read other people’s ideas. Write more in response to other people.

The state of nature and the social contract: Elements of a normative theory

Is anthropology a science? Let’s think a bit more about part of what that means.

These are quotations of the Enlightenment philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

[Man in the state of nature is] satisfying his hunger under an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that furnished his meal; and therewith his needs are satisfied. (Rousseau [1755] 1964, 105)

The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. (Rousseau [1755] 1964, 141)

[Ironically, uniting as a group to restrain individuals] was, or must have been, the origin of society and laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjected the whole human race to work, servitude, and misery. (Rousseau [1755] 1964, 160)

The idea of a social “science” is a break with normative inquiry into society and politics

Anthropology asks empirical questions and seeks empirical explanations, rather than engaging in normative inquiry.

• Empirical questions are questions about what is and why.
• Normative questions are ought questions or should questions

tl;dr Durkheim creates an empirical social science to replace normative theories of society

These are Durkheim's principles:

• Society is a thing sui generis. It causes itself.
• A society is a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, like a big brain that thinks for you.
• A society is like an organism. The parts of society work together to sustain the life of the whole. These parts are functionally interconnected (like the gears of a machine).
• A society’s own normative ideas about how to live (its social norms) are not deliberate choices or designs. They are constructs of a collective mind.
  • Observers need to look for evidence of them in the data of people’s behavior; we aren’t here to debate the people we study.

Although Rousseau and Durkheim have different purposes, I think Rousseau’s ideas have had an important influence on empirical theories of society. More on that later…

What makes me me?

Durkheim’s theory of society is based on an assumption he makes about how people think and experience the world.

We all start with one theory of how we think and experience reality, and there is some truth in it.

• Every one of us goes through life with an irreducible first-person, I-centered perspective.
  • Your senses give you bits and pieces of information. Your brain creates a complete, 360-degree world centered on one person: you.
  • We are not only conscious of the world, we are self-conscious. You are also aware that it is you, your self, that is the perspective you have on the world.
• All of this feels automatic. It would truly strange to experience the world with smash cuts
  • In our minds, reality is not usually avant-garde cinema; it feels like a long take.

We can say that this is the default, intuitively true model of what makes you you and me me. We can’t not think this way about own own subjectivity and our subjective experience of the world.

The default model of subjectivity is that we are each an individual. What if our intuition is wrong?

We start with the premise that we are a specific kind of self-conscious subject. It entails several features:

• I am me; I am the one who is having the experience of the world I experience.
  • My self is a little me that lives in my skull and looks out through my eyes and listens through my ears and puts it all together.
• All of my self is inside my physical body. I am complete.
  • I was born this way. The fundamental fact of my subjective self doesn’t change over my life.
  • I am complete as I am. I can’t add to or subtract from my self.
• My mind is fundamentally separate, distinct, and different from the physical world, including my body.
  • I am in the world and in my body, but I am not the same as those things.
• My mind is endowed with the powers of rationality.
  • I can think logically about what I know.
  • I can deliberate over different possible actions.
  • I can decide for myself which is the best choice for me.

Each of us operates as if we are an individual subject: internally complete, self-contained, autonomous, and rational.

What if we are wrong? Or, better yet, what if the default model is not the whole story…?

Durkheim finds a flaw in Rousseau’s assumptions

Rousseau assumes that people are rational, autonomous individuals in the state of nature.

He concludes that, because humans have left the state of nature, and now live together and cooperate with each other in groups, then

• they should (normative claim) create a social contract.

Is this a good empirical theory of society, that is, an explanation of what is?

Durkheim says that no, it does not work.

• A society cannot in fact be based on an agreement between two or more people.
• To have a contract between two people (or among a group of people), the people have to already know the same things about a contract.
• There is a noncontractual basis for any contract, so there can be no truly social contract (Durkheim [1893] 1933, 206–7).

Durkheim says that subjects are not autonomous individuals. We are all homo duplex.

The default assumption that each of us is an autonomous, rational individual is only partly true.

• We each have a dual existence. We are two minds in one brain (Durkheim [1914] 2005, 36).
• We experience the world as individuals, but there is another kind of subjectivity we have on the other side of a curtain in our brains.
• We are never consciously aware of the thinking in the other mind. It is a thinking mind without an individual self.
  • This is a mind that does not make choices. It’s more like a computer that sorts mail.

I would argue that Rousseau’s ideas are still useful. Society is not based on a contract, but it does involve alienating part of oneself.

Rousseau and Durkheim might end up agreeing that people’s collective existence involves a rupture with a (speculative) state of nature as an individual.

We each live inside our own heads, but society still happens

We are right now living a scene in a movie. “Interior. Classroom.”

• I am just a character in your movie.
• You are a character in mine.

But we are also effortlessly accomplishing an objective reality too: an anthropology class.

• a “class” is a social fact. It’s just a thought of the collective mind of society, but it’s also real.

Without knowing or choosing it, we have collectively participated in the social construction of reality.

Which one is the best example of a social fact?

Answer a multiple-choice question on Mentos, the fresh-meter.

Go to https://menti.com and log in with code 1608 6071. (Or, use this link: https://www.menti.com/alu7ijqprvgt.)

Breaching experiments

Harold Garfinkel asked his students to conduct “breaching experiments” as a way to “[make] commonplace scenes visible” (Garfinkel 1967, 36).

• Students went home on the holidays and pretended that they were staying at a bed and breakfast as a paying guest.
• They got on a bus, went up to another seated rider, and asked (politely) to sit in that person’s seat.
• In conversations with friends, they replied to every statement by the other person by saying, “What do you mean?”

How do you think the people subjected to the experiment reacted?

If you were performing these experiments on your parents, fellow bus-riders, and friends, how would it feel?

References and further reading

Durkheim, Emile. (1893) 1933. The division of labor in society. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. http://archive.org/details/divisionoflabori0000unse.

———. (1914) 2005. “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions.” Durkheimian Studies / Études Durkheimiennes 11: 35–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23866721.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1755) 1964. “Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men [The second discourse].” In The first and second discourses, edited by Roger D. Masters, translated by Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters, 77–228. New York: St. Martin’s Press. http://archive.org/details/firstseconddisco00rousrich.