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Anthropological Theory

DOI: 10.1177/14634996040479222004; 4; 473Anthropological Theory

Thomas J. CsordasEvidence of and for what?

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Anthropological Theory

Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

www.sagepublications.comVol 4(4): 473480

10.1177/1463499604047922

473

Evidence of and for

what?

Thomas J. CsordasUniversity of California, San Diego

Abstract

What kind of language game do we initiate by making evidence the focus of

methodological discussion? Drawing on the example set by Wittgenstein, our first step

might well be to consider the senses in which we can use the notion of evidence in

anthropological writing. These senses must be different if we are asking for evidence of

the existence or nature of a phenomenon (such as, for example, totemism or kinship),

or evidence to test a hypothesis from the standpoint either of validation or

falsification. The sense must also be different if evidence is to be understood in a

juridical sense or an experimental sense. Again, evidence may be understood to be

synonymous with data, or could imply a sense of what is evident, or even self-evidence the immediacy of experience as examined by phenomenology. To determine how

these different senses of evidence color our understanding of the ethnographic

enterprise is the ultimate goal of this discussion.

Key Words

evidence language methodology phenomenology

If someone says I dont know if theres a hand here he might be told Look closer. This possibility of satisfying oneself is part of the language-game. Is one of its essen-tial features.

Wittgenstein, On Certainty

What kind of language game do we initiate by making evidence the focus of methodo-logical discussion? Drawing on the example set by Wittgenstein, we might well considerthe senses in which we can use the notion of evidence in anthropological writing, distin-guishing them paradigmatically from uses of the word in ordinary language and other

kinds of specialized usage, and syntagmatically from other related terms such as percep-tion, data, or fact. To determine how different senses of evidence color our understand-ing of the ethnographic enterprise is the ultimate goal of this discussion. The discussionis loosely Wittgensteinian both in the sense that we want to play with the use of the

word as Wittgenstein might, and that we want to consider what Wittgenstein himself

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had to say about evidence. Suffice it to say that these remarks are very preliminary, andI will in a variety of cases mark out a question or consideration without following itthrough to a definitive resolution.

* * *

A paradigmatic consideration of how we think and talk about evidence would juxtaposeethnographic and ethnological usages with those from other modes of speaking in whichthe notion of evidence is relevant, but relevant in distinctive ways. Speaking strictly withrespect of the purpose of gathering evidence, for example, journalistic evidence isintended to verify the actuality of a situation, the veracity of an account, or the actualityof a statement. Historical evidence is used to determine the existence of temporalprocesses, social conditions at a certain period, or the content and sequence of events.

Judicial evidence in criminal proceedings establishes motives or proves that a crime hasbeen committed by a certain perpetrator. Experimental evidence is adduced in order totest hypotheses, whether in the spirit of verification or falsification. Statistical evidenceis gathered to establish regularities between disparate domains by transforming orredescribing phenomena in numerical form subject to identical analytic operations.Ethnographic evidence is marshaled in order to identify cultural patterns and socialarrangements, and ethnological evidence in order to identify regularities across cultures.

One way this kind of paradigmatic analysis could proceed is to compare sentencesbelonging to each of these domains to see where they part company. Take for examplethe sentence Evidence was strewn about the house. This is not an ethnographic use ofthe term. But now think of the sentence Everything is evidence. There is a sense in

anthropology in which the statement makes quite good sense, since one could regardeverything as evidence for the existence of a particular cultural reality, a particularpattern. This is particularly striking if one compares doing ethnography in ones ownculture and in a foreign culture. When I did my first fieldwork among CatholicCharismatics, mostly middle-class white North Americans, there were moments when Istruggled to find evidence of cultural patterns, practices, attitudes that distinguishedthem from other people of similar background including myself. When I later began

work in Navajo society I was struck by the richness of ways in which difference anddistinctiveness announced themselves, even in those domains in which Navajos were on

the surface of things assimilated to the dominant North American culture.Miriam Rabelo (personal communication) offers a reflection prompted by Gadamers

critique of the notion of experience in the natural sciences in relation to how we some-times use it in the social sciences, evidence then being grounded on the accumulationof experiences that start to repeat themselves, and thus confirm a pattern. She suggeststhat from Gadamers point of view evidence has to be thought of as itself producedthrough a hermeneutical experience, an experience that disappoints some of our pre-established expectations, forcing some change in the anthropologists own previousstance. The idea that evidence eventuates from redundancy to the point of saturation,

or maybe sedimentation in the sense of condensing as a precipitate from within theepistemological field, is important and links up with one of the other issues Im dealingwith, which is the double meaning of evidence as evidence for a position and as thatwhich is evident.

The redundancy at issue here is not the kind that characterizes repeating the same

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experiment to see if the same results are obtained, nor that of manipulating experimentaldesign in order to see if results are concordant in similar experiments. It is the redun-dancy of dipping into a river repeatedly and at different locations to determine whetherthe water is of the same quality with the same kind of sediments and minerals on a

consistent basis. Then the kind of data exemplified by the famous statement Two Crowsdenies this is not evidence against the existence of the pattern. It does not reduce whatwas considered evidence to the status of mere opinion, nor does it indicate that the earlierevidence is wrong. It is in itself evidence that there exists a contradiction or the possi-bility of a contradiction, or that the pattern is not necessarily thoroughly generalizablethrough the field of inquiry in question.

* * *

Let me turn to what I referred to as the syntagmatic consideration of evidence. Here weare thinking of evidence not so much as an idea on its own but in terms of how it fits

with supporting concepts and concepts it supports in a syntagmatic chain such as thefollowing sentence: Perception becomes datawhen it is used as evidence to establishfacts,

which are subsequently elevated to the status of truths and certainties.1We can begin todeconstruct this sentence by noting first that we would be unlikely to understand ourown usage of evidence without reference to the entire set of terms including perception,data, evidence, fact, truth, certainty. I would note secondly that what I have just saidexhibits a nominalist bias, insofar as I recited to you only the nouns in that sentence. Iignored the verbs become, use, establish, and elevate which call for the specification ofprocesses rather than the proffering of definitions.

I will neither claim that this is the only such sentence that could be offered, norpretend to do all the work of analyzing this particular sentence, but will make severalloosely connected observations relevant to our understandings of evidence in anthro-pology. Thus, insofar as its cornerstone is the notion of a fact, let us remind ourselvesthat this notion has a history, which has nicely been traced by Mary Poovey (1993) inher discussion of the origin of the modern fact. Poovey helps us to gain perspective onthe incredible rhetorical sway exerted by numbers in contemporary science and civiliz-ation by tracing the origin of the modern fact virtually synonymous with the quanti-tative fact to no less an unglamourous source than the invention during the period of

early mercantile capitalism of double-entry bookkeeping.Consider also how we use the terms data and evidence. I suggested a minute ago that

in an alien society everything is evidence. It may have been more accurate to say that inan alien society everything is data; but is everything really evidence? Evidence has to beevidence of or for something, and that something is a hypothesis in the broadest sense.This is the difference between evidence and data. Data have nothing to prove in them-selves, though they are distinct from mere perceptions in the assumption that they couldbe used to prove something. And the sense in which they are used to prove somethingmust be different if we are asking, for example, for evidence of the existence or nature

of a phenomenon (such as, for example, totemism or kinship), or evidence to test ahypothesis.Furthermore, the idea of evidence for the validity of a construct (say the habitus) or

for the existence of a process (say globalization) may not make sense, since neither thehabitus nor globalization are ontic entities but in fact ways of organizing data. So the

CSORDAS Evidence of and for what?

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evidence would be simply that the data can be organized under such rubrics or in a wayconsistent with them, and insofar as they either take into account more data thancompeting constructs or that they offer a compelling insight into a particular aspect ofsocial life. And it cannot go without mention that the same evidence can be used to

support different constructs. For example, I have for a long time argued that the waythe notion of habit is deployed in practice theory and the notion of schema is deployedin cognitive anthropology are strictly analogous and refer to the same level of analysis ofsocial life, but the grounding of one in behavior and the other in knowledge has signifi-cant consequences for how we view the human world theoretically.

It is possible to say All the evidence is pointing in a certain direction or toward acertain conclusion. It is also possible to say All the data are pointing in a certain direc-tion or to a certain conclusion. But do they, or should they, mean the same thing? Onecan say The data are accumulating, and one can say The evidence is accumulating,and the two sentences appear to have roughly equivalent meanings. But to say The dataare overwhelming means something quite different than to say The evidence is over-

whelming. The former statement is purely quantitative and has the sense that there istoo much data; the latter has the sense that the conclusion is incontrovertible, that thereis a qualitative shift toward certitude. Accordingly, one cannot refer to the weight of thedata in the same way that one can refer to the weight of the evidence, because the importof that weight is not about quantity but about a certain mass that assures that the balancehas tipped toward facticity, and that is a metaphor for a cognitive shift.

And here is another consideration: What is the difference between saying Look moreclosely and Gather more evidence? Does this imply a difference between a qualitative

and a quantitative form of evidence? One might say Theres not a shred of evidence thatthis is the case. What if there was a shred of evidence? How does that affect ones stancetoward the situation? Can a shred be a compelling shred? How many shreds does it taketo make a case; or can one shred be regarded as a trace that can be followed in a promis-ing direction? The issue may not be a quantitative one. Or perhaps the question is: Whatevidence will convince you that this is the case? In this case evidence is that which createsconviction, so how much evidence is needed to create how much conviction, and whatis the relation between conviction and belief? Note that we already have a this whichis the hypothesis. One would not want to say I have some evidence, but I dont know

what its evidence of , for then how would one be able to call it evidence in the firstplace?

Still another dimension has to be determining the correspondence between levels ofanalysis and whether one is asking for explanation or description. The following uses ofthe term evidence are rather different:

There is evidence that this society has a segmentary lineage system. There is evidence that devotees have the experience of being a deity during posses-

sion rituals.

There is evidence that poverty causes social movements of either a political orreligious nature.

We have to ask whether evidence is a relevant term when the goal is description? Descrip-tion of what? If we already know the definition of what, then evidence is just filling in


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the blanks. Wittgenstein says At some point one has to pass from explanation to meredescription (1969: 22e). It is interesting that he does not say reduced to mere descrip-tion or that one must pass to gathering more evidence. One has the sense that in certaininstances mere description is an advance over explanation.

Along the same lines, in what sense can an event be taken as evidence, and can thisbe only when it is a typical event rather than a singular event? That is, would ethno-graphic use of the singular event have to be called something other than evidence? Evans-Pritchard talked about the granary falling on someone, but that was a typical event.Maurice Lienhardt reported his conversation in which the Canaque elder declared aboutthe European contribution that You brought us the body, and that was a singularencounter. Both are implicated in instances of reasoning by vignette and provided greatdiscursive purchase for both authors, but they are dissimilar in their degree of general-ity. Likewise we can ask in what sense can a statement, a case study, or a life history betaken as evidence does it depend entirely on the stage of investigation and where thestatement can be fitted in with whatever else we know? As Wittgenstein observes paren-thetically at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, the most explicit expression ofintention is by itself insufficient evidence of intention (1958: 165e). This is true at leastin the sense that there are times at which our statements of intention are meant toconvince ourselves of our own intention as much as to state them outright. So what isthe transformative moment at which a piece of data becomes transformed into evidence?

* * *

I want to make one more move to take us beyond the paradigmatic and syntagmatic

discussion of evidence we have pursued so far. Wittgenstein suggests that in certain situ-ations a distinction becomes relevant between what he calls imponderable evidence anddocumentary evidence. His example is that in contrast to color-blindness, which can beestablished as an empirical phenomenon based on concordance of color judgmentsamong those diagnosed as normal, there is no such general agreement over the question

whether an expression of feeling is genuine or not (1958: 227e). Wittgenstein appearsto agree with the statement that The genuineness of an expression cannot be proved;one has to feel it (1958: 228e), but insists that the consequences of recognizing thisgenuineness are of a diffuse kind incapable of general formulation, and yielding at best

what looks like the fragments of a system (1958: 228e). For Wittgenstein, Imponder-able evidence includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone (1958: 228e). To be sure,there have been empirical attempts to document type of glance, gesture, and tone, as

well as to classify rules for their use, but Wittgenstein is concerned with genuineness,and here a certain indefiniteness inevitably remains, that although there are rules theydo not form a system. The question he leaves us with is what does imponderableevidence accomplish? (1958: 228e).

We have to take the specific example of judgments about the genuineness of a feelingor expression of a feeling as pointing to a kind of imponderability that is more gener-

ally relevant for anthropology. In the final analysis Correcter prognoses will generallyissue from the judgments of those with better knowledge of mankind (Wittgenstein,1958: 227e). This is not an elitist position, for such knowledge can be learned. And itis a concern with, or rather the willingness to recognize the existence and relevance of,such evidence that is anthropologys contribution to the human sciences. There is a


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passage in Veena Dass thoughtful essay elaborating the relevance of Wittgenstein toanthropology in which she observes that an anthropological text is marked by a certainkind of excess or a certain surplus (1998: 179). She sees this as an excess of descriptionthat expresses equally the distrust of formal rules and obligations as sources of social

order or moral judgment (1998: 179) and leads to the doorstep of Wittgensteinsconcern with forms of life and language games. In the terms we are using here, it is notsimply an excess of description but the infilling of ethnographic space with imponder-able evidence that is at issue.

Consideration of the kind of imponderable evidence that allows us to judge thegenuineness of a feeling leads us directly to the critically important double meaning ofevidence. In one sense evidence establishes fact in a situation of uncertainty. In anothersense evidence is that which is evident, even self-evident and hence immediately,unmediatedly certain. We must understand imponderable evidence in the latter sense.

And here we can be helped by a brief look at Husserl. Husserl began from the Cartesianposition, in which the primary evidence was I think. For Descartes this evidence wassufficient to draw a conclusion that in his view could serve as a ground for positivescience. Husserl was equally determined to ground positive science, but was far moreradical, for beginning with the observation I think, he proceeded to ask further, Whatis the nature and content of my thought of what and how I am thinking? Husserlsphenomenology is thus a radical interrogation of consciousness, which must be the siteof objectivity if there is to be any. And for Husserl philosophy was included as part ofscience, just as we can say that anthropology is part of science, but in a way ratherdifferent than is proclaimed by various ideologues of scientism.

Wittgensteins goals are in fact in accord with Husserls desire to, in the words ofQuentin Lauer, attain to a being given in such a way that the impossibility of it beingotherwise imposes itself on consciousness (Lauer, 1967: 150). The intention of meaningthat links a conscious subject and the state of affairs expressed in language which I thinkdescribes the realm of imponderable evidence is not illusory when verified by an intu-ition, wherein an object or state of affairs is not simply intended but rendered, so tospeak, bodily present or present-in-itself to the consciousness that intends it. Whenthe object intended and the object given in an intuition are identical, and the conscioussubject is aware of the identification, the object, or better still the proposition, is evident,

its intention has been fulfilled (Lauer, 1967: 1523). For Husserl the fulfillment thatresults in an essential intuition is the result not of imponderables but of radical reductionof the contents of consciousness to a kernel, and in response to the objection that it ispossible to propose contradictory essential intuitions, he responds that one genuineessential intuition cannot contradict another (Husserl, 1967: 155). Apparent contradic-tion would have to be accounted for by the phenomenon not being quite the same, orbeing considered on different levels of analysis, or not sufficiently rationalized or reduced.In fact, Lauer observes that in contrast to the positivist doctrine that essences are unknow-able, Husserl would say exactly the opposite: that only essences are knowable at all. We

know to the extent that we grasp essences. Beyond this we opine (Lauer, 1967: 157).This is rigor indeed, for it means that we should accept as evident only what presentsitself to consciousness with the same immediacy as does the cogito (Lauer, 1967: 1534).In my reading, for Husserl, evidence is only adequate when it presents itself to conscious-ness as self-evident, and self-evidence is closely related to insight, which has at its center


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the unity of a rational positing with that which essentially motivates it (Husserl, 1967:161). I will not elaborate Husserls distinctions between experiencing meaning in themode of the intuitive and the mode of the embodied, between assertoric and apodeic-tic self-evidence, and between adequate and inadequate self-evidence. Suffice it to say

that self-evidence or insight is literally a seeing-into that poses challenges for ethnogra-phy, not the least among which is that it perhaps sets an impossibly high standard ofevidence. We might readily recognize the claim that all meaning is positional, and eventhat the appearing of a thing is rationally motivated by its positionality. But we mighthave reservations about the manner in which Husserls theory privileges the sensorymodel of vision when this privilege has been criticized as ethnocentric, or with the wayhe suggests that insight excludes Otherness when what we want is to place Othernessin a variety of senses at the center of our problematic, or yet again with the argumentthat rational technique allows a progressive harmonious filling out of meaning when we

want to retain and celebrate indeterminacy in incompletion in social life.What we can take from Husserl in order to combine it with the insights drawn from

Wittgenstein is the recognition that not only is there a basic kind of meaning or positionthat corresponds phenomenologically to every category of object including those ofanthropology, but also that there is a basic kind of primordial dator-consciousness ofsuch meaning, and, pertaining to it, a basic type of primordial self-evidence (1967: 166).

Awareness of variations among kinds of consciousness and types of self-evidence doesnot have to take the form of reflexivity of the kind that characterized the methodo-logical crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. It does require that we be vigilant about thenecessity to constantly triangulate and monitor the relationships among kinds of

meaning, consciousness, and self-evidence as we pursue our anthropological goals. Tosum this all up in a single statement, we must recognize explicitly that the problem ofevidence is in essence a problem of speech in relation to experience.

Acknowledgements

This article was originally prepared for a panel on Anthropological Evidence and itsCulture organized by Richard Fox and sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation forthe annual meetings of the AAA in 2003. I am grateful to Steve Reyna and Richard

Wilson for inviting me to submit the article for publication inAnthropological Theory.

Note

1 Veritude is impersonal/objective and certitude is personal/subjective. Something canbe true without being certain, but can it be certain without being true? The wordcertain not only connotes absolute certainty but specificity, and yet it has the vagaryof being able to be used as specific but unspecified, as in une femme dun certain ageor under certain conditions.

References

Das, Veena (1998) Wittgenstein and Anthropology,Annual Review of Anthropology27: 17195.Husserl, Edmund (1967) Phenomenology of Reason, in Joseph Kockelmans (ed.)

Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretations,pp. 15866. New York: Doubleday.


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Lauer, Quentin (1967) On Evidence, in Joseph Kockelmans (ed.) Phenomenology: ThePhilosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretations, pp. 1507. New York:Doubleday.

Poovey, Mary (1993)A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the

Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958) Philosophical Investigations(translated by G.E.M.Anscombe). New York: MacMillan.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1969) On Certainty. New York: Harper.

THOMAS J. CSORDAS is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. His research

interests include anthropological theory, comparative religion, psychological and medical anthropology,

cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture. He has

served as Editor of Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology(19962001), and as President of

the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (19982002). Among his publications are The Sacred Self: ACultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); (edited)

Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self(Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994); Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1997; paperback edn Palgrave 2002); and Body/Meaning/Healing(New York:

Palgrave, 2002).


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