I share Celia’s frustration, detailed in her “Denizens of Virtual Worlds as Lab Rats?” posting, with the way that Dr. Bloomfield chose to end our Metanomics discussion. His monologue was quite ill-informed: despite making strong claims about how culture should in his opinion be studied, he offered us no opportunity for a rebuttal. I actually typed in some backchat comments as he was speaking (a nifty form of resistance afforded by virtual-world technologies), but there was no chance to engage in a real dialogue. I hope that I will have the opportunity to engage in future dialogue with Dr. Bloomfield.
As Celia notes, I just published a piece in Journal of Virtual Worlds Research challenging the methodological partisanship in which some economists interested in virtual worlds engage, particularly regarding how in their view legitimate research on culture (and by extension, everything) should be conducted. As I note in that article, the irony is that most of these economists are conducting top-notch research, research I cite approvingly in my own work. Their dismissal of other approaches is completely unnecessary and indicates a disturbingly narrow vision of the palette of valuable methodologies for conducting research in and about virtual worlds.
As the one of us who is an anthropologist (Dr. Bloomfield incorrectly identified Celia as a “cultural anthropologist,” though she certainly engages in ethnographic research that I consider as good as that of the best among us anthropologists), the sense of déjà vu here is quite overwhelming. Debates nearly identical to these surfaced in the 1980s, and indeed in the debates between Franz Boas and George Mason in the 1880s over “the occurrence of similar inventions in areas widely apart” (see the classic discussion of these debates in George Stocking’s “The Basic Assumptions of Boasian Anthropology,” published as pages 1-20 of his book The Franz Boas Reader (University of Chicago Press, 1974)). Clifford Geertz also expended considerable energy addressing these debates. In his essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (published in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973)), Geertz noted that he was “not timid… at all” (p. 24) about terming ethnographic research a science, stating that:
“There is no reason why the conceptual structure of a cultural interpretation should be any less formulable, and thus less susceptible to explicit canons of appraisal, than that of, say, a biological observation or a physical experiment.” (p. 24)
He then discussed how this kind of “clinical” scientific research generalizes within cases, not necessarily or in all cases across them, and does not seek to predict the future, yet is scientific. Here it is worthwhile to quote Geertz at length, with a few ellipses for brevity:
“To generalize within cases is usually called… clinical inference. Rather than beginning with a set of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law, such inference begins with a set of (presumptive) signifiers and attempts to place them within an intelligible frame. Measures are matched to theoretical predictions, but symptoms (even when they are measured) are scanned for theoretical peculiarities-that is, they are diagnosed… Thus we are led to the second condition of cultural theory: it is not, at least in the strict meaning of the term, predictive. The diagnostician doesn't predict measles; he decides that someone has them, or at the very most anticipates that someone is rather likely shortly to get them. But this limitation, which is real enough, has commonly been both misunderstood and exaggerated, because it has been taken to mean that cultural interpretation is merely post facto: that, like the peasant in the old story, we first shoot the holes in the fence and then paint the bull's-eyes around them. It is hardly to be denied that there is a good deal of that sort of thing around, some of it in prominent places. It is to be denied, however, that it is the inevitable outcome of a clinical approach to the use of theory.” (p. 26)
What Geertz is correctly hitting upon here is that the crucial issue is not qualitative versus quantitative research. The crucial issue is the distinction between the search for predictive laws versus the search diagnostic meanings. Either of these searches can be carried out with qualitative or quantitative methods. The danger of the viewpoint being promulgated by Bloomfield and other economists (in some of their statements, though I wish to emphasize not in all cases) is the ideology that only the first of these searches, the search for laws that predict future events or actions, is scientific. It is this view that leads some (like Dr. Bloomfield) to assume that the value of ethnographic approaches lies only in “setting the stage” for the ostensibly weightier and more scientific research that seeks prediction.
Linked to this issue is the assumption that scientific research must be experimental in nature (thus the idea of using virtual worlds as laboratories in which features are changed so as to see how human action changes within them). The idea that scientific research must be experimental in nature, of course, ignores the longstanding and ongoing tradition of field research in disciplines from zoology to astronomy. A separate issue that Celia raises above is whether the experimental paradigm ever makes sense in virtual worlds. Researchers attempting to use experimental methods in virtual worlds are producing some impressive findings, and I think there remains much to learn. However, I agree with Celia’s point that this research has, to date, not sufficiently addressed the issue that virtual worlds are places of emergent human culture: as Geertz has put it, cultures “do not stand still for their portraits” and any experimental method should address the confounding variables (and ethical concerns) raised by the real human relationships, feelings, actions, and selfhoods being crafted and transformed in real time within any virtual world, even one initially set up by a researcher in an experimental mode for the purposes of finding predictive laws.
It is, of course, ironic in the current moment to see some economists claiming that the only valid research is that which discovers predictive laws. One wishes such economists would have drawn upon the predictive power of such research to have averted the current global financial crisis. In any case, it also bears noting that the vision of economics-as-experimental-science promoted by Bloomfield is in fact only one school of thought in economics. Other approaches, including ethnographic ones, do exist and are even considered valid by some economists. A partisanship toward experimental methods thus likely reflects the dominance of rational-actor theories of selfhood in some economics departments (and the relative exclusion of other approaches). In this very exciting time, when a whole new field of study on virtual worlds is coming into being, it behooves us to not present any methodological approach as less valid or as subservient to any other. What is needed is not a “last word,” but dialogue.
I'm very distressed to hear of this, Tom (and Celia). I just read the transcript from the Metanomics site, and please know that I share your concern about this kind of ambush, and the persistent and misguided ideas which seem to lie behind it. For Dr. Bloomfield to claim that his own view is "pragmatic" especially makes me wince, since it is patently dogmatic to reduce science to hypothesis-testing and generalizability.
It is doubly distressing that Dr. Bloomfield, a fellow author of mine at Terra Nova, also has not chosen to comment or otherwise engage these issues there when I have raised them in my own posts ( http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/05/virtual-general.html and http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2006/12/antiantianecdot.html ) or when he has not responded to comments from me and others about his own posts about using virtual worlds experimentally (see http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/the_glovebox_an.html ).
Posted by: Thomas Malaby | March 08, 2009 at 04:22 PM
Welcome Dr. Boellstorff, and good to see you Thomas... and while I generally agree that the proposed view of culture and anthropology is simplistic (as is my own, I heartily admit, being gleaned from work in community and desultory readings and conversations prompted by that work), I think the elephant's already in the room, cultural experimentation goes on all the time in virtual worlds - let's call it interaction design (and to a lesser extent, community management), part of the overall game or world design. I'll post the gist of my comments in response to Celia's piece, since they're more germane to the points she raises, but I think implicitly, given the plasticity of culture and the ability to influence it and track it in a virtual world or mmo, there's a very big question here about the opportunities for understanding cultural workings, and the results of experimentation.
Posted by: Ron Meiners | March 09, 2009 at 09:37 AM
Please check out this other parallel discussion that is happening on http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2009/03/08/accounting-for-human-nature-anthropology-academia-and-virtual-worlds/
Posted by: Celia Pearce | March 09, 2009 at 05:18 PM