Karl Popper

Karl Popper (1902-1994) is sometimes regarded as the greatest of the twentieth century philosophers. My own explorations of his work have been influenced by the fact that he seems much more applicable to social anthropology than is often appreciated. It is true that there are a few anthropologists who have overtly been influenced by him, not just Gellner but also Michael Banton and I. M. Lewis, both of whom themselves also had links with the LSE (Banton studied at the school for his undergraduate degree during the time that Popper was a lecturer there, and I. M. Lewis was likewise Professor in Anthropology). However, his possible worth to the discipline appears to me to be much broader, both in his more sociological works such The Open Society and its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism, and his deductive philosophy as outlined, for instance, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

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There are different ways of exploring this but one possible is this. Given that the purpose of social anthropology is to discovery more about the world’s societies, the essential problem is how do we know when what we are writing is accurate? This ancient difficulty as to how to access the external world is all the more pressing because the history of social anthropology over the fifty years could easily be written as an account of a series of doubts, each one more profound than before as to the possibility of saying anything reasonable at all.

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To my mind, difficulty is further compounded by the way in which modern social anthropology took shape. Though there is no doubt that Malinowski’s influence was profound in guiding the way that fieldwork should take place, social anthropology actually took its modern analytical form from Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown in turn stressed its inductive and scientific basis which has caused a conflation between the idea of science and induction. This has tended to push considerations of the implications of a deductive approach into the background.

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References 

Popper, K. 1945 The Open Society and its Enemies, two volumes, London: RKP.

 

Popper, K. 1957 The Poverty of Historicism, London: RKP.

 

Shankland, D. 2004 'The Open Society and Anthropology: An ethnographic example from Turkey', in "Democracy, Science and the “Open Society”: A European Legacy?", special issue of the Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, 33-49.

 

Shankland, D. 2019. ‘Anthropology and its History’, in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Vol. 144 Issue 1; 51-76.

 

Shankland, D. 2019 ‘The Role of History in the Teaching of Anthropology’, in Teaching Anthropology, Vol. 9 No. 1; 1-9.

Open Access: The Role of History in the Teaching of Anthropology | Teaching Anthropology

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Shankland, D. In preparation: ‘Truth’ in Anthropology’s Philosophy (London: Palgrave), edited by Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle.