Anthropology and Experiment

3 units

In recent years, many cultural anthropologists have described their work as experimental. On the surface, the notion of experimentation leads something of a double life. On the one hand, in its ideal form, it stands for rigidly held methodological tenets aimed at answering questions in rigorous ways. This kind of experimentations is the hallmark of scientific inquiry. On the other hand, experimentation implies something of open-endedness, of tentative and flexible exploration. Through an examination of works on experiments, as well as purportedly experimental ethnographies, we will pursue the question: What is an experimental mode of inquiry in cultural anthropology, and how does it square with the two idealized meanings of experimentation? We will examine the links and resonances between different notions of what experiments do, what they describe in terms of both form and method, how they begin and end, how they are assessed as successes or failures, and what sort of knowledge they produce. This course involves reading across cultural anthropology, science studies and the philosophy of science to better understand different approaches to experiments across domains of research and writing. Can we learn something about what anthropologists do in experimental works from the wealth of thoughtful scholarship on experiments in other fields? Is there something common to experimentation in cultural anthropology and experimentation elsewhere in the social sciences and beyond?