Why interdisciplinary can matter....

The post below about the decline of biological anthropology as a concentration at Harvard elicited many responses. To some extent the columnist was framing the argument in a Two Cultures fashion. This is an expansive and thoroughgoing argument. I am personally unaware of the direct benefits of studying mathematics and English Literature simultaneously, though I do know that my old secondary school experimented with mixing subjects such as physics and history after my graduation. But though I am unclear as to the direct benefits, I think that the indirect long term fruit can be substantial. Through a study of mathematics and its framework of proofs humanists can see that rigor is possible and that all is not interpretation. Conversely, those in mathematics would see the importance of context, perspective and subjectivity in some scholarly endeavors. On occasion I have been in discussions with humanists where they offer skepticism to any positive assertion that I may make from the sciences, and it is extremely difficult for me to make it clear that though no result is ontologically definitive, the provisional nature of some long held findings is so attenuated as to become background facts in further work. That is, much of science is necessarily contingent & provisional, but the facts, concepts and theories are judged to of very high likelihood. Admittedly, there are other theories which are less widely accepted within the scientific community and the provisional aspect is therefore emphasized to a greater extent. But within the sciences there is a inverse attitude which assumes that humanity is as naked and without guile as the dance of molecules or the paths of planets. The large subset of Creationists who come from engineering illustrate the naive application of scientific thinking, taking religious creeds as axioms and inferring models of the universe. But this brittleness of scientific thinking extends outside of religious fundamentalists, I have encountered many from the sciences who project their certitude across all their beliefs. For example, I know many scientists who have a set of political beliefs which they contend to be true and valid, and which they arrived at purely by reflection and empirical analysis (disregard that they aren't even political scientists!). The possibility that their political beliefs might derive from social context, and their locus within society, their own subjective calculus of preferences and truths, does not cross their minds until I bring the possibility up. Where some humanists become accustomed to a pose of hyper-skepticism, many scientists garb all their beliefs in the fabric of rationalism.

But up to this point I have spoken of differences, and the importance of understanding them. On a more fine-grained level similarities and conceptual bridges are also critical in interdisciplinary work. Within the biological sciences the division between proximate, molecular and mechanistic understandings of processes and the ultimate and evolutionary comprehension are complementary. A biochemist may look at a process and decompose the pathway into its functional elements, with biophysical colleagues who focus specifically on the structural nature of a particular enzyme, but an evolutionary biologist might analyze the contingent nature of the step wise development of the chemistry over deep time. While the biochemist is focused on mapping in detail the the nooks and crannies visible to the eye the evolutionary biologist may offer up necessary or likely future roads to travel because of the general nature of the evolutionary processes which lead to the proximate effects.

Of course some of you might contend that biologists are biologists, they are studying the same fundamental topic even if their scale and level of analysis varies. I think we can move it a step further, consider fields as disparate as psychology, cultural anthropology and history. Psychologists work within a laboratory and use experiments to elucidate and flesh out the general aspects of human cognition. Cultural anthropologists catalog and analyze the range of human behavioral variation in "the wild." Historians trace the development of cultures and societies across time, drawing upon texts and archaeological data. These are very different disciplines, but they are studying humanity, fundamentally the same subject. I would offer that too often psychologists become experts at the cognitive processes of middle to upper middle class university students in the West. Anthropologists become so fixated on the semantical nuances of the tribe which they study that they enter into a tendency to speciate groups so that they as fundamentally alien (begging the question of exactly how they can know what they know if cross-cultural comprehensibility is impossible). Historians obviously know that texts represent but a sliver of human activity, and a biased one at that, but their attempt to generate "social history" often relies on seat of the pants psychology and anthropology, not drawing from the deep well knowledge extant within these fields because of the disciplinary chasm & and their own human confidence in their ability to intuit psychology and sociology.

Let me offer up perhaps an illustration of the synergy that I believe is possible. In Fall of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather notes that when the Goths under Alaric sacked the city of Rome it was a mild affair, and being Christians the barbarians took special care to protect the sanctuaries. This was the ultimate trigger for St. Augustine's City of God, as the pagans of Rome asserted that abandonment of the traditional religion of the Empire for Christianity had only led to calamity. Today we might wonder why St. Augustine might be prompted to respond to what we perceive as a dying religion, but in Making of the Christian Aristocracy the social historian Michele Salzman makes a powerful argument drawing upon the extant documentation that the Roman aristocracy was predominantly pagan as late as the first decade of the 5th century. Now, we are confronted with a peculiarity: the barbarians were Christian, and civilized Romans were quite often pagan. This does not seem to jibe with our perception that Romanitas, civilization qua civilization in the Western world during late antiquity, was passed via the channel of Christianity, the Roman religion to the barbarians of northern Europe in centuries to come.

Anthropology and psychology can help here. In the highlands of northern Thailand members of the Miao/Hmong ethnicity are converting to Christianity. This is strange insofar as the Thai culture is overwhelmingly, and fundamentally, Theravada Buddhist. In India tribal groups in northeast India are Christian, while the mainstream Indian culture is predominantly Hindu. Anthropologists have an explanation on hand: cultural minorities or marginal groups seem to have a tendency to ally with a distant "elite" culture (usually in the form of religion) to preserve their identity in the face of assimilationist dynamics within their local matrix. That is, in Thailand the tribals who convert to Buddhism from their animist religion inevitably become Thai over the generations. Similarly, in northeast India the Hinduization of tribal peoples eventually led to their cultural extinction in the face of demographic absorption. In contrast, when a minority group adheres to a sophisticated religious system which is alien but tied into a "world culture" ethnic minorities can preserve their identity without any perception that they are "less civilized." Rather, by co-opting the prestige of a distant civilization which is in no position to assimilate their ethno-linguistic identity they preserve a portion of their cultural heritage at the price of their religion. But do they truly overturn their religion? The Karens of Burma, many of whom are Christian, contend that their pre-Christian religion was in fact an unelaborated form of Christianity. Both anthropology and psychological studies of religion suggest that there are common elements to all religious belief, and the psychological discontinuity might be minimal. In fact, quite often the biggest shock is expulsion from one's family or cultural group. But the spread of Christianity in places like northern Thailand is one where whole tribes convert, so there is no loss of social ties, rather, the change in religion acts as a way to preserve those distinct connections in the face of assimilation. The fact that psychologically humans tend to conceptualize "gods" in the same manner, no matter the elite formulation, also would lead us to predict that the transition from one mode of worship to another shouldn't be that difficult so long as semantical shifts are minimized, ergo, the tendency to rework pre-Christian religious beliefs as a primitive or unelaborated primal monotheism which simply had to be "completed."

There is no need to go down this path of analysis any further, but, I think that drawing upon what we know scientifically about human psychology and social anthropological dynamics can offer insight into why and how the Goths became Christians, while a core of the Roman elite remained pagan. The Goths were made familiar with Christianity during the 350s, when the Arian heresy was ascendant in the Roman Empire (due to the favor shown it by Constantius II). This is a historically contingent fact which explains the prevalence of Arianism amongst the Goths (and also many other Germanic groups who seem to have picked up Christianity from semi-Romanized Goths). But the ostentatious representation of themselves as Christians is clearly explicable through the models of anthropology which show that tribal groups selectively absorb some aspect of an elite ideology to preserve their own cultural structures from full absorption. The psychology of religion suggests that transition from Germanic paganism to Arian Christianity amongst the masses of tribal members was more notional and nominal, a semantical shift of concept, representation and ritual, than a seismic life altering "conversion" and transference of identity. In contrast, the Roman senatorial elite held to their own traditions and perpetuated their non-Christian networks precisely because switching to the Christian order would have been a cutting off from the prestige of their ancestors, the cults and rites which they had maintained for generations. Unlike the Goths the Roman senatorial elite had a "high" religious sensibility, a multi-textured paganism which ranged from animism toward philosophical Neo-Platonism, a sensibility that in many ways resembled and was mimicked by Christianity in its aspects. Like the non-Christian cultures of Asia they could and would resist Christian monotheism because it offered less to them and their own religious traditions.

The above is only a sketch, and illustration of a few thoughts I've bounced around in my head. But it shows the power in interdisciplinary thinking. Just as nature is one, so is man. The men & women of the past were in many ways both different and the same. Anthropology can shed light on the nature and extent of differences, the dynamics in which those differences play out. Psychology points to the common modal nature of human cognition, the constraints which well up from the physical nature of our brain as neurological biochemical systems. Humans love the the One True Way, whether it is God, politics or even academics. And that is our universal folly!