An epistemological turn: Cheating the death ray of bathos by building an anthropology of hypocrisy (using Foucault)

Abstract

This article takes an epistemological turn, warning that certain areas of social and cultural anthropology face the death ray of bathos, due to deference to an essentialist skepticism. An approximating skepticism is suggested as a means of cheating the death ray. Foucault’s regimes of truth (RoT) standpoint is investigated using such skepticism, and shown to be made more politically relevant if transformed into an anthropology of hypocrisy. In the process of doing this, notions of epistemic practice as well as those of asserted and approximate truth are explicated. The anthropology of hypocrisy approach is formulated through an exploration of Foucault’s understanding of RoTs. The approach is applied through consideration of the work of four anthropologists who interrogate different aspects of imperial and liberal RoTs. Finally, it suggests how an anthropology of hypocrisy both makes anthropology more politically valuable, while cheating the death ray of bathos.

Keywords

Asserted and approximate truth epistemic bathos regimes of truth skepticism

Skepticism: an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Postmodernism is incredulity towards all metanarratives … (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition)

If ours is an epoch of postmodernism and if, as Lyotard says, postmodernists are incredulous towards all metanarratives, then ours is an era of skepticism.¹ Unfortunately a disquieting problem, epistemic bathos, faces certain types of skepticism. Bathos is the taking of something important and making it unimportant. ‘Epistemic bathos’ is taking some area of knowledge that is important and, because of the postmodern view of the ‘unsurpassable uncertainty’ (Calinescu, 1987: 305) of knowing, making only scanty attempts to provide evidence about it. This is bathos because something important is passed off as less important due to the greater knowledge of its ‘unsurpassable uncertainty’. Epistemic bathos is a death ray that kills by rendering its victims disremembered; after all, who cares about not acquiring knowledge about something. One concern is that some areas of current social and cultural anthropology are at risk, because certain practitioners insist upon a ‘postmodernist skepticism about truth’ (Dennett, 1998). Such anthropology lives a miserable existence, perpetually fleeing the death ray of epistemic bathos.

This article offers a means of escaping the death ray by taking a particular epistemological turn, one towards approximating skepticism. This turn is a point in the intellectual history of positivism. There have been a number of positivisms, though the most important of these have been those of Auguste Comte (1830–1842) in the 19th century and of the logical positivists (Carnap, 1950; Hempel, 1945; Schlick, 1932/33) in the first half of the 20th century. These two positivisms defended the epistemological benefits of science. Next, largely in the 1950s and 1960s came the post-positivists (important among these were Feyerabend, 1975; Kuhn, 1962; Quine, 1960), who argued that there were frailties in the positivist position and, by implication, in science itself. However, they never argued that science was fatally flawed and should be abandoned. Rather, they claimed that science should be more modest about its capacities. Then, starting in the 1990s came the post-post-positivists (including, but by no means limited to Boghossian, 2006; Kitcher, 1993; Zammito, 2004). There are two poles to their work. The first is critique of certain, though by no means all, post-positivist contentions. The second is formulation of a renewed epistemology of science, which continues to argue that science is the better way of knowing about reality but that its knowledge claims must be more modest than imagined by Comtean positivists. Theirs might be said to be a ‘scientific neo-realism’. Approximating skepticism is a particular set of practices of this realism. It is the burden of this article to show that it is an epistemological turn worth taking because it can buttress an anthropology of hypocrisy, providing people with rigorous knowledge of important political actualities.

The argument proceeds by first showing how the present intellectual context suggests the value of taking a turn not taken; then exploring Foucault’s understanding of RoTs to actually take the turn and suggesting the novel epistemic practice; next trying it out utilizing the work of Franz Boas, who critiqued one aspect of the imperialist RoT, and three ethnographers who interrogate different aspects of the current liberal RoT helping to pinpoint a frailty with Foucault’s concept of RoTs; and, finally, suggesting the virtues of a more epistemically robust anthropology of hypocrisy. A final point, I am not playing vis-a-vis Foucault the American sport of ‘gotcha’, where a player scores by showing up an opponent’s flaws. Foucault is not an opponent. Although, like every fine intellectual, he had his flaws, nevertheless he was brilliant, and one measure of his work’s value is that, even where it presents difficulties, these contribute to their own solution. It is time to consider the judiciousness of taking the turn not taken.

Why take a turn not taken?

The point of the argument in this section is simple. Social and cultural anthropology are within a particular context whose recognition suggests that it would be prudent to take an epistemological turn. Four aspects of this context need to be delineated if this point is to be made to the reader. A first contextual recognition is that the early years of the 21st century are a miserable time (unless you are rich). Capitalism has triumphed against its socialist competitors but now – alone and unchallenged – it falters, as indicated by five global recessions since the 1970s that have culminated in the current Great Recession. Further, global warming is a runaway phenomenon, already considerably advanced. Finally, it is possible the point of peak oil has already been passed, and increasing scarcity of oil, the chief energy source, has either just begun or is about to begin. Call this the ‘miserable conjunction’, and understand that it is grim because experts calculate that it has the potential of killing hundreds of millions of humans.² Of course, those disposed to skepticism can be skeptical of such claims; or they can believe that political struggle in miserable times is especially important and that prudent persons need to develop ways of waging such struggles. This article seeks to introduce an epistemic practice for conducting political struggle.

The following three contextual recognitions pertain to social and cultural anthropology. The first of these is that some scholars in the discipline have taken an ‘ontological turn’ (Venkatesan, 2010). I wish them the best. However, there is a second contextual recognition which concerns a turn not taken, at least not by social and cultural anthropologists, and which pertains to counter-revolution. In the 1950s and 1960s, anthropologists for the most part thought of themselves as scientists participating in a modern intellectual transformation seeking to explain humans with science. These anthropologists, with greater or lesser degrees of awareness, accepted a scientific realist epistemology. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, hermeneutic, phenomenological, and literary anthropologies emerged, and science came to be regarded as ‘archaic’ (Tyler, 1986), reeking of the sins of ‘positivism’ (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1978). Reyna (1994) examined a number of these anti-science arguments, found them feeble, and documented that they offered no ways of knowing reality superior to science. Nevertheless, dissatisfaction with science expanded in the first decade of the 21st century. The American Anthropological Association (AAA), the world’s largest professional anthropological body, at its 2010 annual meeting decided ‘to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan’ (Wade, 2010).

Latour got it wrong (at least concerning thought about humanity) when he insisted We Have Never Been Modern (1993). First, prior to the Enlightenment, such thought tended to be anti-scientific or a-scientific; then, in the late 19th and first three-quarters of the 20th century, it was pro-scientific; and finally, with the rise of postmodernism, it moved back to being to being either anti-scientific or a-scientific. If utilization of scientific practice is a way of being modern, then, first, we were not modern; next, there was a scientific revolution and we became modern; and, finally, there was a counter-revolution and we became postmodern, which in its rejection of science is pre-modern. This is a second contextual recognition concerning the discipline of anthropology itself. Its postmodern branch is part of an epistemological counter-revolution in the human sciences. Its practitioners have not taken an epistemological turn. This is to say, while they may exhibit enthusiasms for knowing about the nature of being, they are indifferent to knowing ways of knowing about that being.

This indifference means that such social and cultural practitioners tend to be indifferent to ‘epistemic practice’, that is, activities of observation, and analysis of observation, designed to help researchers come to know about a particular area of reality. Epistemic practices are of different qualities. Some are better, some worse. For example, Tylor’s (1958 [1870]) comparative method was an epistemic practice that Boas (1896) showed to have severe limitations, which Boas believed his own ‘historical’ epistemic practice overcame.³ Now it is important to recognize that there are differences in the accuracy of knowledge. Information asserting ‘pigs speak’ is inferior to that stressing ‘pigs do not speak’ and, other things being equal, intellectual disciplines produce more accurate knowledge the more they are able to strengthen their epistemic practices.

The third contextual recognition in social and cultural anthropology that is significant can be grasped when the question ‘What does it mean to be post-science?’ has been answered. For many it means – as the quotation from Lyotard at the beginning of the text makes clear – they are skeptics. However, not all skepticisms are identical and it is useful to distinguish between two grand varieties. On the one hand, there is ‘essentialist skepticism’, the view that there are elements of the practices of knowing which make for, as Calinescu put it, an ‘unsurpassable uncertainty’ (1987: 305) of knowledge. Essentialist skeptics believe if all knowledge is essentially uncertain, then, so be it, end of story, and, by the way, all truths are questionable.

On the other hand there is ‘approximating skepticism’, the view that there are elements of the practices of knowing that make conclusions concerning the knowledge of the world uncertain. However, these skeptics also believe there are more and less robust epistemic practices, so you can know certain things better. They further believe that, if better practices of knowing have been applied, it is the case that such knowledge is more accurate than knowledge not produced using such techniques. Consequently, they continually seek and apply more effective epistemic practices. Essentialist skeptics, on the other hand, inclined to the opinion that all knowledge is uncertain, no matter what, are indisposed to apply effective epistemic practice and to seek more reliable ways of knowing. It is for this reason that epistemic bathos can be a problem for them.⁴

A key boundary distinguishing essentialist and approximating skeptics is the latters’ insistence upon the search for approximate truth as opposed to asserted truth. Let us begin with approximate truth, because its understanding makes comprehension of asserted truth easy.⁵ It is not the 19th-century positivist, Absolute Truth of Comte (1830–42). Nor is it the verified truth of early logical positivists (Ayer, 1936). It is a more modest verity argued for by certain post-post-positivist epistemologists. Empirical statements are ‘approximately true’ if, subsequent to observation of reality, they can be shown to represent that reality reliably and accurately, even though the exact truth of it remains unknown (Niiniluoto, 1987; Weston, 1992). The statement ‘elephants have trunks’ is true because it is possible to accurately observe trunks (‘really long, dangling noses’); and, no matter who makes the observation, providing the observer knows what a trunk is, every time elephants are observed their really long, dangling noses are reliably present. Not all elephants have been observed so it is not known if it is absolutely true that elephants have trunks, but relative to the observations made it is the case that when you see an elephant, then you perceive a trunk.

Approximate truths, further, are non-essentialist ones in the sense that they are not attempts to know the whole, that is, the essential truth of some actuality. A trunk is what you see as a trunk, whatever its essence might be. Approximate truths are partial. This is because observations to establish the truth-value of statements are never of all the actualities these statements are supposed to represent. Consider, for example, the liberal old chestnut, first articulated by Kant (1795), that ‘Democracies do not make war against other democracies.’ The truth-value of this generalization rests largely upon observations made of 19th- and 20th-century western conflicts. But there have been democracies in other unobserved places and other times. So the statement can only be said to be partially true. Because approximate truths are partial they are provisional, in the sense that it may happen that new observations are made that throw into question a particular verity. For example, release of secret CIA files concerning the overthrow of President Allende in Chile in 1973) indicated that the US had covertly acted to overthrow Allende’s democratically elected regime. Such action is an act of war, suggesting that the US, a democracy, had been involved in war with Chile, another democracy. So it can be said that the statement ‘Democracies never make war against other democracies’ was a provisional, approximate truth until the CIA revelations were observed. Finally, approximate truths cannot tell you what values are truly correct. They cannot tell you if a socialist ethic is better than a liberal one; though if such an ethic makes a claim about something occurring in reality, it may be possible to investigate the approximate truth-value of that claim. So if liberals assert that democracies do not go to war against each other, it appears, given the Chilean case, that the approximate truth of this assertion is in question.

Now comprehension of asserted truths is easy. ‘Asserted truths’ are statements that some statement is true in the absence of the observations that show it to be so. They are merely declarations (i.e. assertions) that X is so. The problem with asserted truth is that saying it is so does not make it so. No matter how often you assert, ‘Pigs speak’, neither you, nor anyone else has seen this occur. Some might ask, does this mean that the truths of a particular people are not true? The answer to this question is not straightforward. Certainly, a people may have an asserted truth that is not supported by observation, but it can be approximately true that they have this asserted truth. For example, some people in Chad believed that certain illnesses were caused by shetani (devils) entering the ill person’s body. Nobody had ever observed shetani entering bodies. So the asserted truth is not an approximate truth. I observed that these people did believe that their asserted truth was correct, so it is approximately true that the asserted truth is believed to be approximately true. (Asserted truths will be designated as ‘truths’ and approximate truths as truths in the remainder of the text.) Critically, different sciences do the hard work of developing epistemic practices to make the observations required to formulate truths.

It is at this point that problems for postmodern anthropologists begin. If they are post-science, as they say they are, then they are not scrupulous about applying best epistemic practice in the formulation of approximate truth. Why? Because being post-science, they are not taught in any rigorous manner the tools of empirical research, so they cannot apply best epistemic practice, because they simply do not know it. If this is the case, then they are essentialist skeptics, constructing written or verbal texts that do not struggle for approximate truth.⁶ Their ethnographic texts, their key intellectual product, tend to be a jumble of statements – some by the anthropologist, others by the anthropologist’s informants – where there has been some effort to establish what is said to be by so-and-so about the way things are; but, unfortunately, saying it is so does not make it so. Of course, the term for their statements is that they are asserted truths. George Marcus, writing of current ethnographies, remarked that these were ‘objects of aestheticism and often summary judgment and evaluation’, ‘judged quickly’, used ‘to establish reputation, and, then, often forgotten’ (Marcus, 2002: 3). If their most important intellectual contribution, their ethnographies, tends to be ‘forgotten’, then they are the death ray’s victims. At this melancholy juncture, let us summarize the particular context in which social and cultural anthropology finds itself.

First, it is a darkening world in which there is need for political struggle; second, at least some postmodernists have taken an ontological turn; third, while others have avoided an epistemological turn; and so, fourth, postmodernists in the discipline confront the darkness with an essentialist skepticism and epistemic bathos at precisely the time it should be producing approximate truths to effectively engage in political debates of consequence for the fate of humanity. It is time to take the turn not taken. A way of doing this is by taking a classic bit of postmodern thought – Foucault’s standpoint concerning RoTs – revealing it as essentialist skepticism vulnerable to epistemic bathos, and then showing, if the search for approximate truth is added to the standpoint, how it can become an anthropology of hypocrisy and a tool for political struggle.

Taking the turn not taken: Towards approximate truth and an anthropology of hypocrisy

Taking the turn not taken is accomplished by first interrogating Foucault’s notion of RoTs and then using them as part of an anthropology of hypocrisy. The concept of an RoT was proposed relatively late in Foucault’s career, particularly in the 1977 interview entitled ‘Truth and power’, where he insisted: ‘Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ (1980: 132). A page further on he specified:

‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.

‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to the effects of power which it induces and which extend it. (1980: 133)

So understood an RoT has two components: first, it is ‘discourse’ or ‘statements’ that are not necessarily true but which are made to ‘function’ as such; second, it is ‘procedures’ – part and parcel of ‘systems of power’ – that make these ‘statements’ and move them to people. This means that investigation of RoTs includes two phases, a first one when the RoT’s ‘truths’ are identified and a second one that reveals how the ‘procedures’ that operate in the RoTs produce and distribute the ‘truths’.

Now Foucault appears uninterested in the actual truth of statements when investigating them in RoTs, and only interested that ‘systems of power’ ‘produce’ ‘Truths’. Some explain this as due to the fact that his entire project is an ‘anarchism/nihilism’ (Walzer, 1991: 64). Dreyfus and Rabinow characterize his thought more generally as ‘remaining neutral with respect to the very notion of truth’ (1983: 50). My reading of Foucault’s understanding of truth seeks to go beyond name-calling and to present a more nuanced view. Nowhere in his texts does Foucault formally and explicitly formulate a position on the truth. Where one might expect to find this formulation is in the three-volume collection The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (1998) because Rabinow, a major Foucauldian specialist, says that these texts contain all the ‘writing … central to the evolution of Foucault’s thought’ (Faubion and Rabinow, 1998: x). The second of the three volumes has a section entitled ‘Methodology and epistemology’ (1998: 247–78). Here, if anywhere, would be a treatise on truth, but there is none, supporting the conclusion that articulating a position on the nature of truth was not ‘central’ to his ‘thought’. I believe there are two Foucaults whose existence explains why there was no treatise on truth.

Towards the end of his life, in lectures given at Berkeley, Foucault explained:

My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity. By this I mean that, for me, it was not a question of analyzing the internal or external criteria that would enable the Greeks and Romans, or anyone else, to recognize whether a statement or proposition is true or not. (1983: 1)

This is Foucault I, who does not formulate his own doctrine about truth because it was not his ‘problem’.

However, in the famous essay ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ (1971), reprinted in the ‘Methodology and epistemology’ section, Foucault makes an assertion that exposes Foucault II. Here he stated: ‘The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge (vouloir-savoir) reveals that all knowledge (connaisance) rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth)’ (1998: 387).

The ‘will to knowledge’ in this quotation, the Kantian search for the foundations of knowledge, is portrayed as something ‘rancorous’ or nasty. Why? The text is clear, ‘there is no right … to truth or a foundation for truth’. Insistence that there is no ‘foundation for truth’ expresses an antifoundationalism, affirming that there are essentially no grounds for truth. This is an essentialist skepticism. It is Foucault II.

Perhaps as a result of this essentialism, according to one critic, Foucault exhibits ‘a cavalier attitude toward historical evidence’ (Gane, 1986: 4). Huppert (1974), Anderson (1983) and Hamilton (1996) all critique Foucault’s use of evidence. One failing characterizing much of his research ‘is a total indifference to … formal requirements’ of sampling procedures (Hamilton, 1996: 185). Typically, Foucault will cite a text to make a point; that is, to say that something is the case, which is to say it is true. But he makes no effort to establish that the text is representative. If one is uncertain whether the sample, in this case a text, is or is not representative, one does not know whether it makes the intended point. The Foucault just presented is a creature with a doppelganger. Foucault I is uninterested in truth. It’s just not his ‘problem’. Foucault II, the twin, appears as an antifoundationalist who is not ‘neutral’ with regard to truth. Rather, he is essentially skeptical of its possibilities. As the cases of evidential failing mount in Foucault’s research, perhaps future readers will say, ‘High theory, uncorroborated, why bother’! Such a Foucault perishes before the death ray of epistemic bathos.

Does this mean that scholars should forget Foucault? Jean Baudrillard (1976) certainly thought so. I am not of Baudrillard’s opinion. Foucault’s recognition that humans reside in groups exhibiting RoTs is sound. In fact, in many ways it is a re-invention of Boas’s understanding of culture (though Foucault never seems to have read Boas). Boas, Benedict, Lowie, and Kroeber believed that people’s culture influenced what they believed to be ‘truly’ the nature of being, and that such cultural beliefs, in turn, influenced the way they acted. Boasian cultural belief is expressed as discourse that ‘such and such is “truly” this way’ while ‘this and that is “truly” another way’, and, as such, this discourse corresponds to Foucault’s ‘statements’ about what a people accepts ‘and makes function as true’. Further, Boasians held that a people was enculturated with these beliefs, and that various actors and institutions were responsible for this enculturation. These actors and institutions would be Foucault’s ‘systems of power’ that ‘produce and sustain’ truths. Consequently, one’s culture functioned much as a regime of truth, establishing the verities that one lived by. The study, then, of RoTs so understood is part of a neo-Boasian research program, whose nature and virtues I have argued elsewhere (Reyna, 2012).

Specifically, I imagine the study of RoTs as becoming an anthropological, epistemic practice that can function as a sorting device in political debates. What this device sorts is hypocritical from non-hypocritical truths. Why do this? Because where there is hypocrisy there is a point of attack. So let us term this practice an anthropology of hypocrisy, and sketch how it might work below.

Anthropology of hypocrisy

hypocrisy: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

An anthropology of hypocrisy is an approximating skepticism, winnowing the truths from the ‘truths’ of political claims. This exploration involves acquisition of knowledge of whether asserted political claims are approximately true ones. The practice involves two sets of methods. The first of these are those where the analyst explores an RoT to establish both how its ‘procedures’ and ‘rules’ create and distribute asserted truths, and how it is that these ‘procedures’ and ‘rules’ came about. This can be said to be the Foucauldian part of an anthropology of hypocrisy. It is the analysis of how an RoT originates and functions as a system of power. However, given the discussion of the previous sections, it is sensible that such researchers discard the essentialist skepticism of Foucault II, replacing it with the canons of best epistemic practice to discover the approximate truths of the operation of RoTs.

The second set of methods involves those where analysts operate the sorting device, doing so by evaluating whether the asserted truths of political claims in an RoT can be judged to be approximately true; it being understood that the more the asserted truths of an RoT are observed to be untrue the more its actors are ‘feigning’ its truths and, consequently, are hypocrites. A ‘claim’ is a statement asserted to be true that a particular RoT produces circumstances where some benefit is to be achieved or woe to be avoided. Researchers making such analyses first find statements of claim made by an RoT. Then they find situations where the statements are said to apply. Next they measure whether what is asserted in the claim to be the case is observed to be the case. If the asserted claim matches observed actuality, then the claim is said to be approximately true and there is no hypocrisy. If the asserted claim is a variance with the observed actuality, then the claim is judged approximately false and there is hypocrisy. For example, as we saw earlier, the liberal RoT claims the following statement is true: ‘Democracies do not make war against democracies.’ However, when the situation in Chile is observed pertaining to the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Allende, it is seen that the US participated in his violent overthrow – an act of war – rendering the statement hypocritical.

Analysts evaluating the hypocrisy of an RoT need to be concerned with the depth and the scope of its hypocrisy. The ‘depth’ of RoTs refers to the number of times a particular asserted claim is found to be approximately untrue. It turns out that in 1953 the US government , using the CIA, participated in the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Iran. Equally, according to some reports (Amies, 2011), the US government is currently engaged in covert military operations in Iran, a country with democratic institutions. So there seems to be some depth to the hypocrisy of the liberal claim that ‘Democracies do not fight democracies’.

The ‘scope’ of RoTs refers to the number of asserted claims that are found to be approximately untrue. The more the asserted claims of an RoT are deemed untrue, the greater the scope of its hypocrisy. Clearly the greater an anthropology of hypocrisy’s establishment of the depth and the scope of an RoT’s approximate untruths, the more vulnerable it is to attack as a hypocritical pack of falsehoods. The next section does some anthropology of hypocrisy by exploring certain statements from liberal and imperial RoTs.

Doing anthropology of hypocrisy

Imperial and liberal RoTs are ‘systems of power’ involving institutions of the state, media, and private enterprise, controlled by Euro-American ruling elites, that ‘produce and sustain’ the ‘statements’ which constitute asserted truths of imperial, capitalist, and democratic claims to beneficence.

Imperial ‘truths’: In the late 19th century one of the asserted truths of the imperial RoT was that people resident in territories marked for imperial expansion were ‘savage’ races who, in the words of Rudyard Kipling were ‘half devil and half child’, that is, they were racially genetically inferior to the white race of the imperialists, and so it was, again in the words of Kipling ‘the white man’s burden’ (1899) to assist these inferiors by establishing imperial domination over them. The claim here is that imperialism is a benefit because it assists genetically inferior races.

One way of establishing the approximate truth of this asserted truth is to evaluate racist theory in general. A key asserted truth of this theory was that racial characteristics were genetically acquired. Boas’s (1912: 60–75) study of immigrant body form was an elegant exercise in the invalidation of such theory. He had been observing immigrants to the US and their offspring since the late 1880s. Specifically, he measured bodily form traits such as ‘cephalic index’, the ratio of the maximum width of the head to its maximum length (i.e. in the horizontal plane, or front to back), because such traits were believed to be inherited and had long been used to establish racial difference. Remember, parents and children belong to the same race. Hence race was held constant and so parental and offspring generations should have the same cephalic index. A particular aspect of environment had been varied in Boas’ study. This was food culture (what people eat and how much), with children being raised more in American food culture and parents in other, more European food cultures. The crucial observation was that cephalic index variation between parents and children was of statistical ‘significance’ (1910–13: 62); that is, children had different cephalic indices than parents. Furthermore, the variation was found to be greater with the length of time the immigrants had been in the US. Hence, the longer offspring were in the US and participants in American food culture, the greater their cephalic index difference from their parents. Such a finding invalidated the asserted truth of racist theory, because it revealed that differences in body form were associated with culture, not race. It was:

most instrumental in overturning notions of genetic fixity in bodily form and was the essential demonstration that the environment had an important role in the expression of such traits. If the cephalic index could change in a generation, so could anything else … (Holloway, 2002: 1)

Sparks and Jantz (2002) re-analyzed Boas’s data on bodily form and claimed that their finding contradicted Boas’ original findings. Gravlee et al. (2008) analyzed the Sparks/Jantz study and concluded that they had misinterpreted their own findings which actually support the conclusion ‘that, on the whole, Boas got it right’ (2008: 326). What Boas got right, and later studies were not able to overturn, was that the imperialist claim of genetically inferior races was suspect because racial traits could be explained culturally and not genetically.

In the years following Boas a large number of studies directly observed the relationship between race and intelligence and, while a number of studies have claimed an association between the two (most recently Jensen, 1969 and Rushton, 1995), a large number showed no relationship between race and intelligence and that research claiming the reverse is flawed (see especially Alland, 2002 and Brace, 2005 for discussion of these studies). Another way of putting this is that there is considerable depth to the judgment that the claim of racial inferiority of certain races is approximately untrue. Imperialists like Kipling who asserted otherwise were hypocrites. Let us turn now to three ethnographers who interrogate asserted truths of the liberal RoT.

Liberal ‘truths’: Neni Panourgiá, Diane Austin-Broos, and Naomi Schiller investigate in different places different manifestations of the current liberal RoT, understood as a set of different statements whose asserted truths are that freedom, private property, capitalism, and democracy are the desirable social arrangements in ‘modernity’ and/or ‘postmodernity’.⁷ In different ways their findings demonstrate the approximate untruths of the asserted truths in this RoT. Let us begin by examining Panourgiá’s contribution.

Panourgiá (2011) analyses US–Greek relations between 1945 and 1974 and US–Iraq relations since 1990, insightfully showing similarities between the two. I shall concentrate upon her analysis of Greek–US relations. Specifically, she notes US policy and practice towards Greece during this time, operating principally through the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan,⁸ was supposed to bring capitalism and democracy to Greece as well as the rest of non-communist Europe. Indeed, there are many Cold War narratives that assert this was what ‘truly’ happened.

Panourgiá recounts a very different story with regard to democracy. Greece, she tells readers, was allotted $3.4 billion in Marshall Plan funds, out of which only $1.2 billion went to economic aid, with ‘the rest used for military aid and defense support’ (2011: 149). Where did this military money go? A least some of it:

went to the construction of the concentration camps of Makronisos, Yaros, and Trikeri, to military tribunals, to election fraud (with living trees and dead people voting). Between 1947 and 1953 (and then 1958, and then 1963) more than 100,000 people (Leftists, Communists, Marxists, ‘Fellow Travelers’ and even people merely being suspected of being sympathizers) were sent to these camps where they were tortured and many killed. (2011: 149)

What sort of a political regime was established in Greece with American assistance? Panourgiá reports that:

With the end of the war, first British and then American involvement and intervention was on internal affairs and specifically on the destruction of the Left. The OSS first and the CIA later set up not only Operation Gladio but a number of covert operations that created in the country an environment of intense fear resulting from the systematic confinement, exile, torture, disappearance and assassinations of members of the Left … culminating in the sustained support of the Junta of Colonels between 1967–1974. (2011: 150)

Operation Gladio was especially objectionable, as it utilized secret, paramilitary forces specializing in terrorism to support rightist political goals throughout Europe. It was especially active in Greece and Italy (Ganser, 2007). One asserted truth of American assistance to Greece in the post-war years was of liberal democratic triumph. In fact the approximate truth was something else –concentration camps and the despotism of the Colonels. Consider next Austin-Broos’s analysis of liberal asserted truths in the Australian outback.

Austin-Broos (2011) discusses early 21st-century Aboriginal politics in Australia. Specifically, she analyses a discourse concerning indigenous peoples currently produced by ‘writers, based in private think tanks and in the Murdoch press’, joined by certain anthropologists who have repented of being ‘museum keepers’ for Aborigines and acquiesced to Murdochian sensitivities (2011: 141). The Murdoch press and its allies talk the talk of neoliberalism. Their discourse is replete with statements that Aborigines live autonomous lives in isolated ‘homelands’, independent of western’ – that is, Australian capitalist – influence. In this discourse, they are the last remnant of the ‘savage’, described by Kipling and portrayed in ‘portraits of pathology that detail violence against women, extremes of alcohol dependence, very high rates of illiteracy and unemployment’ (2011; 141), with a titillating hint of ‘child sexual abuse’ out ‘in remote communities’ (2011: 138). The explicit, asserted truth of this neoliberal discourse is contained in one statement: Australian ‘savages’ live lives of ‘disorder’ (2011: 141). The implicit, unspoken asserted truth is: if you don’t get with liberalism, you become plastered, wife-beating kid-fuckers.

Austin-Broos’s crucial observation is that, contrary to neoliberal assertions, indigenous groups ‘have been incorporated into the cash and commodity world’ (2011: 141), with the collusion of the Australian state. Incorporation, she shows, involved a long-term process of ‘marginalization’. This ‘marginalization:

is not simply poverty as normally understood or even unemployment. Remote Indigenous Australians face a situation that could well be unique … Throughout the twentieth century, most were held on pastoral stations or reserves in a condition of ‘institutionalized poverty’, and provided with payment in kind or meager incomes subsidized by the state. Consequently, at the time that Indigenous Australians were released to land rights and self-determination, they were also, for the first time, fully incorporated into a cash and commodity world that was also the state’s welfare economy. As arrivals in a newly commodified world, Indigenous Australians proved slow to accumulate moveable goods. (2011: 142)

Approximately truthfully speaking, as opposed to neoliberal asserted truthfully speaking, the lives of Indigenous Australians are ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. Not because they have been excluded from the liberal world but because they were incorporated in it; and when they were, they became caught by the political economy of the Australian state and global capital in a downward spiral of marginalization. Let us turn to Schiller’s (2011) contribution and to liberalism in Venezuela.

Venezuela under Hugo Chávez is a country where competing narratives with dueling RoTs are struggling with each other as part of a conflict for control over the state. On one side there is Chávez, and his followers: champions of ‘21st-century socialism’, whose ideological conversation is Bolivarianismo. On the other side is the President’s domestic opposition: Escualidos (‘Squalid Ones’) – middle-class and elite Venezuelans, plus their media allies. Additionally, there are the Imperialistas Yanquis: sections of the US government, some non-governmental organizations (NGOs), some intelligentsia, and that part of the media whose ideological talk is neoliberalism. These critics are blistering in their attacks upon Chávez. Condoleezza Rice, Bush II’s Secretary of State, complained that Chávez ruled in an ‘illiberal way’; while Hillary Clinton, Rice’s replacement in the Obama administration, explained that this was because, among other reasons, he did ‘not govern democratically’ (in Leech, 2009).

Consider the actualities of democracy in Chávez’s Venezuela. There is universal suffrage. There are elections. Freedom House – a liberal, American NGO that evaluates countries on their democratic performance, and which has been critical of socialist Venezuela – admits in its 2010 country report that ‘voting is relatively free and the count is fair’ (Freedom House, 2010). Chavez was elected by large majorities in the last three elections (1998, 2000, 2006); in contrast to the last three US elections where, in one of them (Bush II in 2000), the winning, Republican candidate lost the majority vote but received the presidency due to the votes of five Republican Supreme Court justices.

It is correct that term limits have been removed in the office of the president, provoking liberal claims that this would allow Chávez to rule as president-for-life. Of course, presidential rule prior to Chávez was decided according to a practice termed puntofijismo, whereby the two main liberal parties agreed to alternate the presidency (Pilger, 2008). Critically, opposition political parties continue in Venezuela, and these have enjoyed electoral success. For example, ‘in 2000, opposition parties won most governorships, about half of the mayoralties, and a significant share of the National Assembly seats’ (Freedom House, 2010), suggesting that it is not impossible for the opposition to triumph electorally. Venezuelan opposition parties charged in 2010 that the re-districting provisions in a recent law gave the government broad authority to gerrymander districts in a manner that would benefit its candidates. Of course, gerrymandering is an old, cherished, and widespread US political practice.

Liberals assert that civil liberties are required for democracy. Venezuela has a constitution that accords civil liberties to citizens. Freedom House warns of their diminution because ‘Politicization of the judicial branch has increased under Chavez’ (2010). On the other hand, it is clear that USA Patriot Act (2001) threatens American civil liberties; and a recent article considers the present as ‘an era of judicial politicization’ in the US (Uelman, 1996: 1133). Additionally, Freedom House positively reports, ‘The formal rights of indigenous people have improved under Chavez’; ‘Women enjoy progressive rights enshrined in the 1999 constitution, as well as benefits offered under a major 2007 law’ (2010); and ‘Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom are generally respected’ (2010).

There has been liberal angst about press freedom under Chávez , even though there is a vigorous, well-funded, non-governmental media in Venezuela. Schiller has studied the Venezuelan press. Specifically, she conducted fieldwork at Catia TV, which is Caracas’s largest community television station. Catia TV began as a movie-club in the 1990s for el pueblo (poor people) in a west Caracas neighborhood. After Chávez was first elected in 1998, the government began investing oil resources into community media projects developed by activists largely supportive of the efforts to help the poor. Catia TV used these funds to transform itself into a television station that began broadcasting in 2001. The employees of Catia TV are people from humble origins, trained by the station to be employees and managers. Catia TV is government funded but then so is the BBC.

Schiller’s research revealed a broadcast practice at Catia TV of denuncia-making. Denuncias (demands or complaints) are characterized by Schiller as follows: ‘colleagues at Catia TVe regularly received many visitors from surrounding areas who hoped to use Catia TV as a venue to report their denunicas (complaints) about the inconsistencies and failures of government leaders and programs’ (2011: 36). Catia TV would prepare a denuncia for broadcast by sending out a broadcast-team, usually an interviewer and camera-person. The interviewee making the demand would be interviewed following negotiation with the inteviewer over precisely what, and how, the interviewee should express her or his complaint. The denuncias that the station most often considered were grievances made by the groups of the poor in barrios working in collective projects that were typically organized and paid for by the government. The practice of:

[b]roadcasting denuncias was critical for Catia TV’s ability to fulfill its claim to be partial to el pueblo. Airing denuncias made clear the station’s stance as both of and for ‘the community’ … rather than acting in the interests of the government. (2011: 38)

The preceding suggests that the Chávez regime has been extending democracy, with community television production of denuncias facilitating this. Denuncia-making takes concerns from the poor and, through negotiation between those making demands and Catia TV employees, puts them on the screen for everyone to see and hear, especially officials, hence directly projecting poor folk’s demands into the government. So, the development of community television under Chavez seems to be a way of extending democratic participation to the poor. The liberal asserted truth that Chávez ‘does not govern democratically’ goes unsupported by the evidence. What are the implications of the findings of these three ethnographers for hypocrisy?

They find that a number of different asserted liberal truths in countries ranging from Greece to Australia to Venezuela are contradicted by the evidence. This means that there is considerable scope to the hypocrisy of the liberal RoT. It is time to draw the threads of the argument together.

Conclusion

This article has documented that there is currently a miserable conjuncture, characterized by grave environmental and economic problems and political struggle will be required before they can be resolved. It has also established that it is a time of skepticism. Two types of skepticism – essentialist and approximating – are distinguished, with the former subject to epistemic practices that make the sorting of truths from ‘truths’ problematic, thus promoting the death ray of epistemic bathos, and the latter supporting epistemic practices that facilitate the sorting of truths from ‘truths’, promoting escape from the death ray of epistemic bathos.

The article has taken a particular epistemological turn by advocating an epistemic practice of approximating skepticism, the anthropology of hypocrisy. This practice is based upon modification of certain of Foucault’s views about RoTs. Its function is to sort truths from ‘truths’, in order to evaluate the depth and scope of an RoT’s hypocrisy. It is understood that demonstrating that an RoT is notable for the depth and scope of its hypocritical twaddle makes it vulnerable to attack in the political struggles to be waged as the disasters of the miserable conjunction emerge.

The more general recognition here is that it helps to know your enemies in political struggle. However, governing elites have enormous communicative powers and it is easy for them to disguise their truths of disutility as ‘truths’ of utility. The proliferation of essentialist skepticism in postmodern epistemic practices serves these elites well by making a muddle of sorting truth from ‘truth’, and hence preventing the discovery that your enemies are the hypocrites who say one thing and do another. The more general epistemological message is: go ahead and be skeptical, but do so employing an approximating skepticism with emphasis on the application and innovation of approximate truth-making practices as a way for anthropologists, or any human researchers, to both cheat the death ray of bathos and to contribute to resolving the desolation of the miserable conjuncture.

Footnotes

Notes

Stephen P Reyna (PhD Columbia University 1972) is currently at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute of the University of Manchester and the Conflict and Integration Working Group of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology. He has publications dealing with social theory, power, culture and the brain, and Africa.

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