Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

82 Chapter 3
time. They describe things; they develop deep understanding of the cases they
study; and they produce explanations for individual cases based on nomothetic
rules. The study of a volcanic eruption, of a species’ nesting habits, of a star’s
death is no more likely to produce new nomothetic knowledge than is the
study of a culture’s adaptation to new circumstances. But the idiographic
effort, based on the application of nomothetic rules, is required equally across
all the sciences if induction is to be applied and greater nomothetic knowledge
achieved.
Those efforts in psychology are well known: Sigmund Freud based his theory
of psychosexual development on just a few cases. Jean Piaget did the same
in developing his universal theory of cognitive development, as did B. F. Skinner
in developing the theory of operant conditioning.
In anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) and others made a brave, if
ill-fated effort in the 19th century to create nomothetic theories about the evolution
of culture from the study of cases at hand. The unilineal evolutionary
theories they advanced were wrong, but the effort to produce nomothetic theory
was not wrong. Franz Boas and his students made clear the importance of
paying careful attention to the particulars of each culture, but Leslie White
and Julian Steward did not reject the idea that cultures evolve. Instead, they
advanced more nuanced theories about how the process works (see Steward
1949, 1955; White 1959).
And the effort goes on. Wittfogel (1957) developed his so-called hydraulic
theory of cultural evolution—that complex civilizations, in Mexico, India,
China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia developed out of the need to organize the
distribution of water for irrigation—based on idiographic knowledge of a
handful of cases. David Price (1995) studied a modern, bureaucratically organized
water supply system in the Fayoum area of Egypt. The further downstream
a farmer’s plot is from an irrigation pump, the less water he is likely
to get because farmers upstream divert more water than the system allows
them legally to have. Price’s in-depth, idiographic analysis of the Fayoum irrigation
system lends support to Wittfogel’s long-neglected theory because,
says Price, it shows ‘‘how farmers try to optimize the disadvantaged position
in which the state has placed them’’ (ibid.:107–108). Susan Lees (1986)
showed how farmers in Israel, Kenya, and Sudan got around bureaucratic limitations
on the water they were allotted. We need much more idiographic analysis,
more explanations of cases, in order to test the limitations of Wittfogel’s
theory.
Julian Steward (1955) chose a handful of cases when he developed his theory
of cultural evolution. Data from Tehuacán, Mexico, and Ali Kosh, Iran—
six thousand miles and several thousand years apart—support Steward’s nomothetic
formulation about the multistage transition from hunting and