Understanding Other Societies

We can take our discussion further by looking at what Winch has to say about witchcraft in a classic paper on the Azande (Winch 1974). It also enables us to develop some criticisms of his position.

For Winch, Evans Pritchard is not sufficiently critical of the view that Western science is (at least in limited ways) better at dealing with these things than the Azande. Winch argues that, as a matter of principle, we cannot show that science is superior because to do so would require drawing on a language into which all other languages could be translated and compared, a language which had a privileged access to reality, a language which today might be called a ‘meta-narrative’.

Winch draws again on Wittgenstein, who had

come to reject the whole idea that there must be a general form of propositions. He emphasised the indefinite number of different uses that language may have and tried to show that these different uses neither need, nor in fact do, all have something in common...

(Winch 1974: 90)

Each language has its own criteria, its own rules about what is right and what is wrong, about what exists and what does not exist.

The only things we have access to, says Winch, are forms of life - the languages spoken by different cultures, the rules that enable the attachment of meaning to the world. There is no super-language with access to a ‘real’ reality: all realities are real in the context of the language that defines them as such. The Azande have witchcraft, the British (and others) have science; each society has its own forms of rationality which are likely to be unintelligible to members of the other society. If, for example, a Zande native were to knock on my door and tell me that the hens I keep in my backyard were not the right sort of fowl for the oracle, then he or she might very well be right, but the statement would puzzle me and it would have no meaning except as a strange story. If I, as a British native, were to point out to the Zande native that his or her beliefs were logically contradictory, I would be right but my statement would be as irrelevant to my visitor as his or hers was to me.

Two consequences seem to follow from this position. The first is that we are unable to take moral positions on other forms of life, on what goes on in other cultures. This is an issue that will recur in various ways, and all that we need say about it at the moment is that there is an attraction to Winch's position in the context of contemporary debates about multiculturalism and the general distaste with which traditional and imperialist attitudes are regarded, particularly in the academic world. Winch gives us no basis for converting the heathen, either to Christianity or to science, but nor does he give us any basis for criticizing what we might regard as the unacceptable features of other societies - female circumcision, for example, or authoritarian dictatorships. If there is no meta-language into which forms of life can be translated and compared in terms of their relationship to an external reality (the epistemological question) or any meta­logic which enables us to judge forms of life in terms of their rationality, there is also no metaethic which enables us to makes moral judgements about different forms of life.

This type of debate is not unrelated to the questions that arise around Thomas Kuhn's concept of the paradigm in the philosophy of the natural sciences. Can we judge between paradigms? This is related to the question of whether we can translate from one paradigm to another. Here is the second consequence of Winch's argument: it raises the question of whether we can actually understand another culture at all, whether we can translate from one form of life to another in a meaningful way.

Winch's answer to this is a subtle one which can be seen as a plea for making the effort to understand other forms of life and a criticism of the Western society from whose form of life he speaks. He refers to another linguistic philosopher, Rush Rees (1960), who points out that, within our own culture, we tend to participate in numerous language games (or components of wider forms of life) as we go about the diverse activities of our lives, and the meaning of a statement in one language game will depend not only on the particular game in which the actor is engaging at that particular moment but also upon its relationship to all the other games in which the actor is involved. There is an overlap between the language games in which I am situated - the language of the sociologist, the family member, the British citizen, the cricket lover and so on. For the individual:

Whether a man sees a point in what he is doing will then depend on whether he is able to see any unity in his multifarious interests, activities and other men; what sort of sense he sees in his life will depend on the nature of this unity. The ability to see this sort of sense in life depends not merely on the individual, though this is not to say that it does not depend on him at all; it depends also on the possibilities of making such sense which the culture in which he lives does, or does not, provide.

(Winch 1970: 106)

One assumes that Winch might include women in this as well. He goes on, in a discussion of an argument, put forward by Alasdair MacIntyre, that Azande witchcraft is a way of trying to increase production, to argue that MacIntyre misses the interconnectedness of Azande practices:

[A] Zande's crops are not just potential objects of consumption: the life he lives, his relations with his fellows, his chances for acting decently or doing evil, all spring from his relation to his crops.

(Winch 1970: 106)

And he seems to see the tendency to miss these connections as representing a lack in Western culture - the blinkers which come from our instrumental way of looking at the world. The reason we should study other cultures is that it extends our own awareness of life and its possibilities.

This still does not answer my second question of how we gain access to other cultures, of how we can begin to translate or move from one form of life to a very different one. Winch's answer is that all cultures face certain problems that are in one way or another at the centre of being human - they all have to handle birth, sexual relations and death; these notions are implicit in the idea of life itself. There are many different ways in which new members of a culture are raised and socialized, many different ways in which sexual relations are organized and many different ways in which the dying and the dead are handled. But all societies have to do these things, and they provide the possibility of mutual understanding - of recognizing the other in ourselves and vice versa.