Implicit Explanations

Architects is an ethnographic account of an architectural practice, focusing on the lives of ten architects and the work they undertake, mostly in the confines of a single office, based in the United Kingdom. Their comments on early drafts were not encouraging. “A bit dense,” as one of them put it, “my eyes slightly glazed over.” Another used architectural imagery to highlight a linked problem: “It’s as though you’ve constructed a building and left the scaffolding on,” he remarked. The “scaffolding,” by which he meant conceptual reflections and theorized arguments, seemed a distraction from the descriptive passages he found most engaging. The metaphor of the scaffold is drawn from his own professional practice and is also a reflection of the sensibilities that orient it. Architects, at least in this practice, spend a lot of time discussing “precedents,” drawing influences and inspiration from other designs, but in the final instance they are clear: a building cannot be explained; it has to speak for itself.

These responses made me question how and for whom I was writing, and provided the stimulus for an experiment in ethnographic form. The analogy is not precise but got me thinking: What would a description look like if conceptual engagements with other scholars were treated as “scaffolding”—enabling the construction of a descriptive object whose effectiveness depends on their ultimate removal? Perhaps the problem was not to explain their lives but to refrain from explaining them too much. In a sense there is nothing particularly new in this approach, good ethnography having long been recognized as a matter of “showing, not telling.”

Rewriting the manuscript, I aimed to downplay, footnote, or excise various elements of narrative scaffolding, including some that academic readers have routinely come to expect: broadly speaking, a theorized argument of a singular kind, explicating novelty against an already-existing set of conceptual positions. Other scholars have highlighted some of the linked changes associated with the reification of this academic form of writing: the rise of interdisciplinary research relates to a proliferation of perspective so that novelty must be more explicitly stated to stand out; processes of research audit, at least in the United Kingdom, are associated with definitions of “world-leading” research, more readily recognized through novelty staged argumentatively using established professional discourse; the rise of social media as a research tool likewise leads to a proliferation of voices, and the imperative to speak loudly in order to be heard.¹ Writing is more often driven by argument, resolved as “points” with a singular focus that can be easily and quickly grasped by a readership with limited time and attention. Even as ethnography is often reified and romanticized in anthropological discussions, in practice the “showing” seems to be increasingly less valued than the “telling.”

With these thoughts in mind, the first plank of academic scaffolding I sought to remove was theory, in the specific sense of externally derived explanatory frameworks of a singular kind. “Writing is an exercise in humility,” writes Nigel Rapport: “Theory is proud in its claims at comprehension. But theory would nevertheless appear to be the principal means of misrecognition—not the reverse—in its making of the other into an object whose point is to prove that theory’s assumptions. Academia would seem prone to theoretical pride: trafficking in coherent stories and plausible interpretations. But … this is to bring an artificial order to a wild world” (2015, 681).

By implication, his target is “grand theory,” and its claims to what Dominic Boyer, James Faubion, and George Marcus (2015) elsewhere characterize as a “monopolizing epistemic authority,” an inherent asymmetry of knower and known. Rapport advocates the antidote to this, in writing that “eschews theory for a return to the everyday.” Arguably, he presents the relationship between academic theory and everyday life in overly binary terms: all descriptions must “tame” to some degree, simplifying even if only enough to bring particular forms of complexity into focus; all are oriented by more or less stated interpretive approaches, ideas drawn from other scholars or examples, that open up ways of seeing, even as they may close down others. Marilyn Strathern’s (particularly 1988, 1991) insistence that “theory” and “description” occupy the same conceptual plane highlights how good descriptions arise through the comparative lens of other people and places. “Theory,” from this perspective, is not a fixed set of ideas but the conceptual “remainder” of the descriptive act: how anthropological concepts are changed and extended in the act of describing particular circumstances. Still, the thrust of Rapport’s argument has particular resonance in the current moment: pulled toward the assumptions and expectations of fellow professionals, anthropologists, like other academics, are routinely drawn into explanation that often seems to move away from the concerns that animate the lives of those we seek to understand. Even those approaches emphasizing the interdependence of theory and description have more often emphasized the theoretical implications of descriptions than the descriptive implications of theory.² My account was an attempt to move in the other direction, scaling back argument as a frame and focus of description. I hoped to amplify understanding of the complexity of architectural lived reality, to give more attention to those aspects that remain specific and inchoate, to dwell in architects’ own explanations of what they do and why. Whether or not successfully, I aimed to refuse the kinds of exegesis that would render these details as epiphenomena of my own explanatory theory.

Second, and relatedly, my approach involved the deliberate attenuation of explicit argument. Focusing on Godfrey Lienhardt’s ethnography of the Dinka, Michael Carrithers elucidates some of the elements that made the classic monographs of the middle of the twentieth century so compelling: “Lienhardt devotes his effort throughout to the knotty labor of finding the most felicitous way of characterizing the Dinka themselves, rather than adopting the established conceptual coinage of professional anthropology or engaging argumentatively with established professional opinions. He leaves us to infer his understanding of those other voices and how they might err” (2014, 136, emphasis added).

The vivid qualities of Lienhardt’s writing were as much a function of what he said as what he did not. Literary theorist Wolfgang Iser develops this point while discussing Virginia Woolf’s exposition of the role of the reader’s imagination in the work of Jane Austen: “[The reader] is drawn into the events and made to supply what is meant from what is not said. What is said only appears to take on significance as a reference to what is not said; it is the implications and not the statements that give shape and weight to the meaning. But as the unsaid comes to life in the reader’s imagination, so the said ‘expands’ to take on greater significance than might have been supposed; even trivial scenes can seem surprisingly profound” (1980, 111).

Imagination works through language as an interplay between explicit and implicit, revelation and concealment. Many good examples of this interplay exist in ethnographic writing, but the general shift to explication and argument has tended to leave less implicit.

A third and final form of textual attenuation relates to analysis. In her introduction to Marie Olive Reay’s book Wives and Wanderers, Strathern explains, “In the book analysis remains very largely off stage … and the pride of place is given to descriptions of people’s doings, as they apparently occurred, in story-like form.” Comparing this to ethnographic writing of a more conventional kind, she notes, “Much ethnography is seemingly written of the moment. Yet the moment in which the ethnographer writes is also turned to the ends of exposition, and conveying a sense of immediacy has to compete with that. The trade-off between immediacy and reflection, between what is observed and what is analyzed seems inevitable.” (2014, 46). If observation and analysis are inherently connected, Strathern highlights how minimization analysis has amplifying effects with respect to the capacity of observational description: without the framing post facto analysis of the observer, description captures quick changes from moment to moment, replicating the unpredictable qualities of social interactions: “An element in any ‘encounter’ is its unpredictability: people try to guess what will happen, watch how others behave, see how this or that person will react. The dynamic of the relationship makes everything for a moment unknown.” (2014: 48) Analysis, of course, is needed, among other reasons, to spell out what is meant from what is said (or not), the contexts through which words and actions acquire significance. The aim of minimizing explanatory analysis related to a desire to amplify those forms of explanation that are emergent within the ethnographic contexts described.

I am aware of the irony that my own explanation of the limits of singular argumentation itself takes a rather argumentative and singular form. I am also conscious of the contradiction of arguing for a particular kind of exemplification that I have not in fact exemplified. I explicate these explanatory orientations and aspirations in the knowledge I have often and perhaps always fallen short of them. I hope that the book itself goes some way to demonstrating what I have here hoped to explicate. But many other and perhaps better examples of this approach exist, including a number of ethnographies whose narrative forms and sensibilities have inspired my own (particularly Crawley 2021; Luhrmann 2012; Pandian 2015; Yaneva 2009). Beyond their obvious differences of focus and approach, what I take these to have in common is the productive sense in which an explanation can be implied through an ethnographic description. In all these accounts, description is its own tacit explanation in ways that reach beyond a conceptual explication.

On Explaining Ourselves

Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method is an account of anthropological comparison. As in a grotesque mirror image, the book consists almost entirely of what Tom’s book seeks to leave out: theory, argument, and analysis. The book’s prime material—what it describes—are theories and arguments. Whereas other meditations on comparison have woven their arguments and exemplified them through a range of ethnographic and historical contexts (see, for instance, Van der Veer 2016), the gambit in this book is to take anthropologists’ own theories, arguments, and disagreements about comparison as the object of study and the source material. The book is, in that sense, a kind of historical ethnography of anthropology’s own conceptual practices—it is, as Strathern perceptively noted, “a report from the field” (2020, 118), the field here being anthropological theory.³ One reviewer at least was frustrated by the lack of ethnographic exemplification in the book (Gellner 2022)—but the point is precisely that the thickness of this particular style of ethnography is made out of what we normally think of as “theory.”

The book is a description of these theories and arguments, but it is also self-consciously and explicitly an analysis, leading up to an argument of its own—indeed an explanation. By analyzing the recurrent patterns that emerge from anthropological writings about comparison, the book seeks to explain why, despite seemingly endless amounts of methodological reflection on the subject, anthropologists appear to have little agreement about what comparison is and how one ought to do it; it also seeks to explain why, despite a recurrent self-definition of comparison as the very heart of the discipline, anthropologists so often seem to conclude it is de jure impossible and yet carry on doing it all the same.

Its first part traces in some detail the extended and often convoluted debates anthropologists have had for around 150 years about comparative methods, paying particular attention to the recurrent ways in which they have sought to compare different modes of comparison. Over and again, these comparisons of comparatisms have tended toward dichotomies, marking out one older and misconceived vision against a newer and better alternative. These paired alternatives (historical comparison vs. functional comparison, structural vs. typological, interpretive vs. positivist, etc.) are never quite the same, but the form of the argument recurs: there always seem to be two ways of doing comparison, and one (the new one we are proposing) is better than the other (the old one they have been attempting). The result of these constant theoretical-methodological revolutions is a space of argument that undervalues continuities, shared techniques, and heuristic moves that carry over from one form of comparison to the next. There is a tendency to reinvent the wheel.

It is also a space in which differences in purpose tend to get elided. As Lawrence Fisher and Oswald Werner wrote of a different set of debates, “Any brand of anthropology can be shown to be woefully deficient if the objectives of one program of explanation are substituted for those of another explanatory program” (1978, 195). Different modes of comparison are often aiming at different ends. To ignore this is to forget the fundamental distinction between critiquing another scholar’s goals and critiquing their devices. We too easily dismiss earlier visions of comparison on the grounds of what they couldn’t do, or of what they systematically did wrong, without due attention to what they were trying (and not trying) to do. In so doing, we are often missing or choosing to ignore all the caveats that earlier authors set up about the necessary limits of their comparative devices. Concomitantly, in proposing bright new alternatives, or in praising those of our friends or mentors, we too easily forget what our own cherished devices can’t do, or choose not to do.

Hence the book is, among other things, an argument for being explicit about the nature and crucially the limits of our conceptual devices. It is an argument for the value of explaining ourselves and our devices. The second part seeks to clarify this discussion by picking out some key formal properties of anthropological comparison, which orient the radically different uses to which comparative devices can be put. In so doing it focuses on—to borrow a central term in Tom’s ethnography—“the space between” these different purposes, the methodological space in which anthropologists’ comparative devices remain shared even as their purposes diverge.

This space can only be kept in view if we do away with the engrained mental habit, and scholarly convention, of taking things “with a pinch of salt.” This habit gives one key to the paradoxical way in which comparison seems to be simultaneously impossibly complicated and wholly self-evident. Most of us are more or less acutely aware of the heap of objections raised at some point or other against almost every aspect of anthropological comparison—from the problem of identifying units of comparison, to the possibility of commensuration, to the politics of comparative representation … And yet—there’s the paradox—we go on.

Thus we invoke cultural units, social groups or patterns of behavior, while all the time implying or stating that we are well aware that these are just convenient fictions and that reality is far more complex. We analogize entities while mentioning in passing that of course they are also, in other ways, profoundly different, or contrast them while gesturing to the fact that in many other ways they fade into one another. Some of us appeal to philosophically abstruse techniques for challenging the very grounds of what counts as an object or a relation, while all the while appealing to ethnographic particulars grounded in descriptions and local generalizations of the most conventional kind. At every turn, an implicit or explicit appeal to taking things “with a pinch of salt” keeps these contradictions out of view.

In one sense this is fine—such bracketing is unavoidable and productive. Comparisons can productively be imagined as bundles of heuristics that get jobs done, humble and unassuming techniques that churn away below the level of grand epistemological debates. These comparative moves, tricks, and fixes bracket extensively, they make no guarantees to absolute truth or exhaustiveness, and yet they keep the discipline going, keep it together, and produce exciting new work. It would be impossible to do any kind of intellectual work—or to live any kind of life—without bracketing. The vision of complete explicitness is a mirage.

There is a world of difference, however, between bracketing something and just forgetting about it. Heuristics are valuable primarily because we know when they fail (Wimsatt 2007). Or to put the point otherwise, in the language of politics rather than engineering, it is fine to exclude, black-box, and simplify as long as we have a path back to and remain responsible for what is being left out (Barad 2007).

In part because of the “pinch of salt,” anthropologists have too often taken the impossibility of comparison for granted and just “gotten on with the job” under cover of some vague caveats. The resulting landscape is one in which we seem to be forever saying things we don’t quite mean, to others who don’t quite mean them either, but often in different ways or for different reasons. It is this habit of taking things with a pinch of salt, as much as anything else, that contributes to the sense that if we really thought about it, comparison would be impossible—so best not think about it too much.

Being more explicit about the limits and exclusions of each of our comparative heuristics, by contrast, can lead us to layer and combine them into thicker and more intricate comparative arguments. This means taking a step back from the ultimate point or aim of any given comparison, to ask what another, differently constituted comparative device might add. When your attention is hooked by a difference, ask also about similarities (and conversely); when you find yourself looking at objects, ask about the processes and relations of which these might in another sense be the effects (and conversely); and so forth. This might seem like a counterintuitive procedure. Why not simply get to the point? What it speaks to is the sense that to be animated by a purpose, to set a course for a particular horizon, is not the same as just imagining one has reached it. In that latter belief lies the risk of dwelling in platitudes and truisms. By themselves, our horizons have little power either to convince or to illuminate. After all, we can already see them from here!

This normative valuation of intricacy echoes the normative principle of “robustness.” Robust combinations of heuristics are multiply redundant; they come at the same questions from different angles; they are interwoven in such a way that some can fail without sabotaging the entire enterprise. Robustness as articulated by engineering-minded philosophers of science such as William Wimsatt are implicitly wedded to one particular aim: the pursuit of the real, the objective, and the generalizable. The kind of robustness envisaged here, by contrast, could be deployed in pursuit of a broader range of aims. Indeed it would come in part from the way in which anthropologists aiming in radically different directions (toward generalization or critique, objective identifications or increasing self-doubt) work alongside one another and hold each other to account, not for their divergent aims but for their moves in the shared space of method.

Conversation

On Emergent Explanations

This conversation doesn’t have a natural endpoint. For the purposes of this chapter, however, one might round things off here by pointing to one central concept that has come together in the foregoing pages of the chapter—namely, the concept of an “emergent explanation.” Retrospectively we might define this in general terms as the ways in which an explanation emerges between and across different explanatory contexts that relate without being commensurate. Our account has foregrounded the productive ways in which such explanatory differences may be reconciled without resolving into a singular frame. Emergent explanations keep different explanatory aims and assumptions productively in view and actively related.

We offer the concept of emergent explanation as a critical alternative to those explanatory forms that seek to collapse or resolve difference, most obviously in the form of singularizing arguments, monocausal explanations, and those that generalize—for instance in ontological, cultural, or sociological terms—as truths over and above the contexts they relate. We hope this formulation adds conceptual precision to the more instinctive explanatory orientations that framed our account: emergent explanations necessarily work in slow and concrete ways that do not lend themselves to totalization or generalization. They are not incompatible with summary but remind us that the sum is always productively more and less than the parts.

Our shared investments in this concept are located in relation to specific aims and assumptions, which the dialogue has helped us to understand and formulate. In hindsight, we might recognize how our dialogue was framed by a normative question, which can now be recast more descriptively as two distinctive versions of how best to encourage explanatory emergence. Each of these anticipates and frames two specific kinds of readerly response.

Through Tom’s contributions, the idea of an implicit explanation foregrounds the explanatory potential of description: how descriptions of specific ethnographic contexts open explanatory possibilities, conceptual affordances, and imaginative possibilities in ways that are unanticipated and open-ended. In these cases, it was suggested that description involves tacit explanation that is distinct from the straightforward absence of explanation. The reader infers or imagines concepts in a way that depends on the absence of explication.

Matt’s discussion, by contrast, foregrounds the productive effect of being explicit about what particular accounts and analytical devices (such as particular forms of comparison) were intended to do, and what they were not intended to do, in order to leave the reader free to go somewhere else with the material, to do something else with the analytical devices, beyond the horizon and interests of the author. Here explanatory emergence is facilitated by the way in which the author’s explanatory frameworks are laid out explicitly, so that they can be bypassed or borrowed and put to work in other contexts.

In specific ways, our contributions have highlighted distinctive forms of explanatory emergence through which anthropological texts are routinely built. Matt has made explicit how explanations are built intertextually as relationships between concepts and contexts that are in some sense analytically reconciled. Tom foregrounds how ethnographic writing has an emergent quality involving the juxtaposition and comparison of explanatory difference within a given field. In both these senses, the explanatory work of anthropology often has an interstitial quality, residing between and across other explanatory concepts and contexts. Comparisons juxtapose contexts that help to explain each other. “This” illuminates “that” and vice versa. However, the insights that emerge from these ethnographic and analytic relations cannot be subsumed in positions over or beyond these elements.

Our dialogue led to a concept that neither had anticipated (emergent explanation) and is therefore an instance of what this concept purports to explain: through our chapter, explanation emerges as an unfolding relation between positions. At least for the authors, the result is not a collapsing or resolution of those differences but a better and more reconciled sense of where those differences lie. From both of our perspectives, the chapter helps to explain something that we hadn’t understood as we set out to write it. Our explanation is emergent in the dialogue, in the sense of being led toward an unanticipated understanding through a process. It remains epistemologically emergent in the sense that it relates our differences of orientation without resolving these. We hope this ultimate irresolution creates a space in which readers can draw their own conclusions.

NOTES

1. 1. This point has been made by a number of commentators from various disciplinary perspectives, including anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (2000), sociologist Frank Furedi (2004), science studies scholar Isabelle Stengers (2018), and literary critic Stefan Collini (2016).

2. 2. Godfrey Lienhardt’s approach to ethnography has some resonances with recent accounts, in their insistence on starting from understandings of the ontological basis of others’ categorical distinctions (I am thinking particularly of Viveiros de Castro’s “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation” [2004] and Holbraad’s Truth in Motion [2012]). My own account draws inspiration from these approaches: in their insistence that “theory” and “description” occupy a single plane of explanaton; and in the methodological orientation that engenders commitment to the effort to understand others’ lives, as the necessary corollary to a skepticism toward anthropology’s own concepts and theories. Description of the particularities of others’ lives requires that we—professional anthropologists—reconfigure our categories in the act of bending them to circumstances for which no encompassing explanation exists. By the same token, ethnographic description is the means by which new concepts are generated, as old ones are extended or found to be wanting. The rationale is compelling (Englund and Yarrow 2013), and many of the resulting descriptions are insightful. However, asymmetries are reintroduced where the point of this equivocation is less the production of faithful descriptions than the novel conceptual points that derive from these. Despite a number of notable examples to the contrary, proponents of this approach seem more often oriented by the aim of unfolding theory (ethnographically derived concepts) from description (the circumstances of other people’s lives) than to the production of accounts in which description is the point. In this respect Lienhardt exemplifies a distinct approach, from which I draw inspiration.

3. 3. In respect of that strategy, the book has a far more distinguished precursor in Strathern’s own Partial Connections (1991; updated 2005). As one reviewer just as perceptively noted, this is the sort of book a former journal editor would write “in recovery mode” (Shryock 2019, 414).

4. 4. I have some sympathy with Latour (1988) when he sarcastically points at the towering layers of reflexivity piled on in some postmodern accounts: here is me thinking about me thinking about me thinking about me writing this thing about me thinking that … It’s as if we thought our readers were too naïve, he says, and so we had to diminish the power of our writing, by stepping outside the text to caveat it. Equally, though, I am no longer convinced by Latour’s converse proposal, that we should just live with the fact that all we do is tell stories (even when they are stories about us telling stories …), and so that instead of caveating and diminishing their power to convince, we just try to make our stories as convincing as possible, using every rhetorical and stylistic trick in the book. That’s in essence his argument against explanation too—a description that needs an explanation is not a good enough description—and I no longer find that convincing.

5. 5. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Mol’s own The Body Multiple (2002) is written in two layers—I wonder if you’re arguing for the top layer and I’m arguing for the bottom layer?

6. 6. This idea gets us close to the vision of explanation that, as we note in the introduction, philosophers of science have described as “pragmatic”—a vision of explanation as relative to the interests and perspectives of those who receive it.

7. 7. See also Rapport (this volume).

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