He couldn’t think of anything to say. Or when he did, he would say it so awkwardly and self-consciously that it disturbed the flow of the conversation. He didn’t have the knack for casual conversation that Dusenberry had. He wasn’t the person for the job. Dusenberry could sit there all weekend and gab on and on with them about their families and their friends and anything they thought was important, and he just loved that. That’s what he was really in anthropology for. That was his idea of a wonderful weekend. But Phædrus had never learned how to make small-talk like that and as soon as he got into it his mind always drifted off into his own private world of abstractions and the conversation died.
He thought that maybe if he did some reading in the field of anthropology he might know better what to ask the Indians. So he said goodbye for a while and drove from the hot plains up into the Rocky Mountains near Bozeman. At the college there, now a university, he took out the best books he could find on anthropology, then drove up to an old remote campground near the timberline and settled down to do some reading. He hoped to stay there until he had some kind of plan for a book sketched out.
It felt good to be back in the stunted pines and wild flowers and chilly nights and hot days again. He enjoyed the ritual of getting up in the morning in the freezing camper, turning on the heat, and then going for a jog up a mountain trail. When he came back for tea and breakfast the camper would be all warm and he could settle down to a morning of reading and note-taking.
It could have been a great way to do a book but unfortunately it didn’t turn out that way. What he read in the anthropology texts slowed him down more and more until it stopped him.
Phædrus saw with disbelief at first and then with growing anger that the whole field of anthropology was rigged and stacked in such a way that everything he had to say about Indians would be unacceptable. There was no question about it. Page after page kept making it clearer and clearer that there was no way he could continue. He could write a totally honest, true and valuable book on the subject, but if he dared call it anthropology it would be either ignored or attacked by the professionals and discarded.
He remembered Dusenberry’s hostility and bitterness toward what he called objective anthropology, but he always thought Dusenberry was just being iconoclastic. Not so.
The professionals' refutation of his book would go something like this:
A thesis of this sort is colorful and interesting but it cannot be considered useful to anthropology without empirical support. Anthropology tries to be a science of man, not a collection of gossip and intuitions about man. It is not anthropology when someone with no training or experience spends one night on a reservation in a teepee full of Indians taking a hallucinogenic drug. To pretend he has discovered something that hundreds of carefully trained methodical workers who have spent a lifetime in the field have missed, exhibits a certain overconfidence that the discipline of anthropology tries to restrain.
It should be mentioned that such theses are not at all unusual in anthropology. In fact, during the early history of anthropology, they dominated the field. It was not until the beginning of this century, when Franz Boas and his co-workers started to ask seriously, Which of this material is science and which is not? that speculative intuitive rubbish unsupported by any real facts was methodically weeded out of the field.
Every anthropologist at one time or another arrives at speculative theses about the cultures he studies. It is part of the fascination that keeps him interested in the field. But every anthropologist is trained to keep these theses to himself until he is sure, from a study of actual facts and proofs, that he knows what he is talking about.
Very formidable. First you say things our way and then we’ll listen to you. Phædrus had heard it before.
What it always means is that you have hit an invisible wall of prejudice. Nobody on the inside of that wall is ever going to listen to you; not because what you say isn’t true, but solely because you have been identified as outside that wall. Later, as his Metaphysics of Quality matured, he developed a name for the wall to give it a more structured, integrated meaning. He called it a cultural immune system. But all he saw now was that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with his talk about Indians until that wall had been breached. There was no way he was going to make any contribution to anthropology with his non-credentials and crazy ideas. The best he could do was mount a careful attack upon that wall.
In the camper he did less and less reading and more and more thinking about the problem. The books that surrounded him on the seat and floor and shelves were of no use to him. Many of the anthropologists seemed to be bright, interested, humane people but they were all operating within the wall of the anthropological cultural immune system. He could see that some of the anthropologists were struggling to get outside that wall, but within the wall there were no intellectual tools that would let them out.
As he reflected further on that wall he thought about how all paths within it seemed to lead to Franz Boas, who in 1899 had become Columbia University’s first professor of anthropology, and had so completely dominated his field that most of the anthropology in America today still seems to lie in his shadow. Students working within his intellectual domain became famous: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Paul Radin and others. They produced a flowering of anthropological literature so great and so rich that their work is sometimes mistaken for all of cultural anthropology. The key to getting through the wall lay in re-examining the philosophical attitudes of Boas himself.
Boas' training was in mathematics and physics in nineteenth-century Germany. His influence lay not in the establishment of a single particular theory of anthropology but in the establishment of a method of anthropological investigation. This method followed the principles of the hard science he had been trained in.
Margaret Mead said, He feared premature generalization like the plague, and continually warned us against it. Generalization should be based on the facts and only on the facts.
It is indubitable that science was his religion, Kroeber said. He called his early convictions materialistic. Science could tolerate nothing "subjective"; value judgments — and by infection even values considered as phenomena — must be absolutely excluded.
On one slip, headed Goldschmidt, Phædrus copied down the statement that This empiricism, this concern with fact, with detail, with preserving the record, Boas transmitted to his students and to anthropology. It is so major an element in anthropological thinking that the term "armchair anthropologist" is one of opprobrium, and two generations later we still insist on field work as a requisite to any claim for anthropological competence.
By the time Phædrus finished reading about Boas he was confident he’d identified the source of the immune system he was up against, the same immune system that had so rejected Dusenberry’s views. It was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself. There have been many schools of anthropological theory other than Boas' but Phædrus could find none that opposed him on the matter of scientific objectivity.
As he read on, Phædrus could see more and more of what the negative effects of this application of Victorian science to cultural anthropology had been. What had happened was that Boas, by superimposing the criteria of the physical sciences upon cultural anthropology, had shown that not only were the theories of the armchair anthropologists unsupported by science but that any anthropological theory was unsupported by science, since it could not be proved by the rigorous methods of Boas' own field of physics. Boas seemed to think that someday such a theory would emerge out of the facts but it’s been nearly a century since Boas had those expectations and it hasn’t emerged yet. Phædrus was convinced it never would. Patterns of culture do not operate in accordance with the laws of physics. How are you going to prove in terms of the laws of physics that a certain attitude exists within a culture? What is an attitude in terms of the laws of molecular interaction? What is a cultural value? How are you going to show scientifically that a certain culture has certain values?