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Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences
by Mary Douglas and Steven Ney Univ. of California Press, 1998 223 pp.; $24.95 |
We live in the age of the acronym. And the social sciences, it seems, have more than their fair share. Just the other day I was reading a piece from the journal German Politics. Here I learned that the GDR's EMSU with the FRG has not eliminated the PDS on account of PUD! When translated this roughly means that the former citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) have not found economic, monetary, and social union (EMSU) with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) all they had hoped it would be; that the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS)—the East German post-Communist party—is undergoing revival; and that there is—and this is the key point—growing postunification dissatisfaction (PUD).
While anyone of average intelligence can work their way through this tangle of alphabetical shorthand, it's the propensity to reduce social and political complexity to abbreviated measurables that is of interest here. PUD, it turns out, is a kind of psychosocial pathology that apparently afflicts former East Germans, and what's more it can be computed. You see, they were beneficiaries of the "well-proven institutional system" of the West, including civil and commercial law, social security, collective bargaining, and most of all a market economy. Add to this their receipt of large financial transfers with no obligation of repayment. So— hey!—what's wrong with these people? Given such "institutional guarantees and massive financial aid," why are they dissatisfied? Why is there PUD at all? And having invented it, the writer tells us that its existence "demands a consistent and theoretically sound explanation."
It is precisely this species of social scientific analysis, with its reduction of human worth and happiness to calculable economics, that is the subject of searing critique by Mary Douglas and Steven Ney in Missing Persons. Courtesy of the marriage of convenience between the ideology of the free market and the rugged individualism of the West, social science has persistently traded in the depreciated currency of desocialized human subjects and pseudo-scientific objectivity. The consequence has been an impoverished conception of the person which has not only afflicted academic social science, but has had dire policy implications.
It has meant, for example, that poverty has routinely been seen as a personal experience arising from a dearth of desirable commodities. Social science smitten with such materialist and—crucially—calculable inclinations has persistently turned a blind eye to an abundance of anthropological evidence disclosing people who, without the blessings of modern gadgetry, all the while enjoy short working hours, good company, and stimulating conversations ranging from farce to philosophy. Not bad. And all without the trappings of the material West. As Marshall Sahlins tellingly put it: "We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free." The anthropologists, it seems, have long been confirming that neither man nor, for that matter, woman ever could live by bread alone—even while econometricians were constructing a wants discourse out of patterns of consumption and income distribution.
This, in brief compass, is the impulse behind Missing Persons. But simply reiterating the book's leitmotif is to do scant justice to the subtlety and profundity, not to say—on occasion—the obscurity and complexity, of the argument and illustration. At times the book is intimidatingly cryptic, at others expansive; at times it wears its wisdom on its sleeve, at others its insights are buried beneath novel, even chancy, connections; at times it is crystal clear in its diagnosis, at others infuriatingly oblique. Of course nothing less should be expected of Mary Douglas, one of our greatest living anthropologists, renowned for such classics of the modern anthropological canon as Purity and Danger, Natural Symbols, and more recently Risk and Blame. And it is entirely appropriate that, teaming up with Steven Ney from the Institute for Technology and Society in Vienna, she should present her withering critique of dehumanized human science as the inaugural lecture series established in honor of the late Aaron Wildavsky, who played such a large part in the establishment of the modern study of public policy.
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