Science is Hard!

Robert Lemelson is visual and socio-cultural anthropologist and a residential researcher at UCLA's Semel Institute of Neuroscience. His work is heavily based in Indonesia and dramatically and unflinchingly explores issues of psychiatry, religion, conflict and trauma.

One of my favorite blogs, Neuroanthropology, recently did a post on his 2011 film, The Bird Dancer (Elemental Productions), which investigates the experience of Tourette's Syndrome as a collection of illness meanings through the context of a Balinese sufferer.
What I mean by illness meanings is that Tourette's Syndrom (TS) is not portrayed as it would be in a Nova special or on WebMD, biologically s and only at the very end socially contextualized, rather Lemelson anchors onto the social and cultural aspects of TS, giving not only a uniquely Balinese perspective of the experience but also with that penetrating gaze of the anthropologist.
The illness meanings anthropologists explore are what a scientist would call "soft data". The soft v hard science debate is a contentious one, and it rarely ends in favor of anthropology. Some of my previous posts touch on this tendency for anthropology, and other social sciences for that matter, to be inherently compared to sciences like physics, with the resultant attitudes are dubious of the qualitative methods and interpretive nature of (socio-cultural) anthropological inquiry. I am continually re-exposed to the view that only hard science is an acceptable form of data and that anthropologists are apparently trying to act as legitimate scientists (which I still can't find evidence of, and evidence after all is the anchor of hard science). Without even searching it out, through analysis of the "every-day", these attitudes persist. To be noted, anthropology is a broad field and has interdisciplinary tendencies. Forensic anthropology and physical anthropology are examples of a solid integration of hard science and social science and can be very technical indeed. Socio-cultural anthropology, on the other hand, can lean heavily towards the humanistic pole, eschewing numbers for more complex symbols or words and relies on qualitative, or soft, methods of research like descriptive writing. This "flavor" of anthropology tends to be under attack for something it is not, a hard science, and is not clearly distinguished for what it is, a way of studying people humanistically and with special import paid to person-centered accounts and experience and subjectivity. Doesn't sound very scientific? Well, it's not! It's wonderfully un-scientific and allows for a creativity of thought I relish.

What we do is indeed interpretive, something scientists abhor and the public generally doesn't take seriously. In the field of medicine, however, both hard and soft approaches to research need to be called upon. Lemelson's consideration of disorder and sickness, however dire the circumstances he shows us seem, isn't the medium our society takes seriously. The life of a Balinese TS sufferer indeed is removed from the evidenced based medicine we practice, and entrust our lives with, in the US. Thankfully, views are shifting and hard scientists are figuring out why the "humanistic" holds just as much weight as the "scientific" in solving problems. While TS isn't an epidemic or pandemic or really a public health concern at all, it does greatly effect the lives of the patients and their supporters and this in turn effects treatment. Treating and healing the sick and disordered is the agreed upon aim of medical science but the politics of knowledge value oft get in the way. It is human nature to be distrusting with new ideas, and with money, and numbers and graphs can be pretty convincing sometimes, while narratives on the subjectivity of second-generation Mexcan-American immigrants that have Type II Diabetes may be alarming, and surely interesting, but perhaps not worthy of hundreds of thousands in funding. These stories are meaningful, however, and invaluable to posterity.


http://www.elementalproductions.org/