Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Structure of Folk Models by Ladislav Holy and Milan Stuchlik
Review by: Roy Ellen
Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jun., 1982), pp. 371-372
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2801846
Accessed: 07-02-2020 00:23 UTC

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 372 BOOK REVIEWS
ing information about indigenous knowledge
and the discovery of emic rules are alluded to,
they are not given the prominence one might
expect. The introdictory declaration that
hitherto 'folk models' have only been of
'marginal' interest, and that 'new' lines of
enquiry are being heralded, is overdone, as a
brief inspection of much American anthro-
pology would show. Neither is there any dis-
cussion of 'folk models' of the natural world,
for which there is now an extensive literature
offering somewhat better prospects for estab-
lishing the usefulness of various methods of
gathering data. From the outset, maybe, the
editors assumed an interest in models of the
social world alone, but nowhere is this stated.
Kay Milton comes nearest to the ethno-
science position in arguing that processes of
inferring 'folk models' should be 'explicit and
replicable' (p. I57). The difficulty is-as she
readily admits-that the results thereby
achieved are extremely limited, and even then
her own procedures to establish and quantify
informants' statements are questionable. Cri-
teria mentioned only once, she says, were
omitted for 'the sake of convenience'. But how
do we know that their restricted occurrence
was not itself an artefact of the method and a
'numerical relation of informants to statements
[which] is very uneven' (p. I45)? Engagingly
honest perhaps, but distinctly odd in the con-
text of her paper. Some of the same difficulties
apply to McFarlane's tables of Shetlander
stereotypes of incomers (p. I25), but then he
does not make the same claims for his material.
Both Jenkins and Galaty provide some
methodological ballast -with their attempts to
formulate theories of 'cognitive practice' which
will reconcile the dualism of material and
symbolic, thinking and doing, cultural models
and events, meaning and action. In a polemical
piece which promises to 'avoid facile conjunc-
tions . . while overcoming sterile disjunc-
The
tions', Galaty criticises distinctions between
the
material and mental that imply that these are
different kinds of data requiring different re-
search practices. He scolds Holy and Stuchlik
for having subscribed to this view. This is also
a theme which Ardener has made his own; he
actually presented a most pertinent paper at the
conference (which does not appear in the
volume) and it is odd that reference is nowhere
made to his work. We may accept that 'vulgar'
materialists have drawn the distinctions too
dramatically-that our 'observations' of social
relations and utterances are in many respects
similar (and overlapping); that we see not only
unique physical actions and objects, but also
ones that we classify and conceptualise in the
instance of perception-we fool ourselves if we
therefore believe that investigative procedures
and statements of causality need in no way
differ. We may agree to shed the sloppy
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metaphors of 'observable' and 'unobservable',
of what is 'in people's heads' and what is 'on
the ground', and concede that 'folk models' are
to a considerable extent 'authored' by the
anthropologist, but this does not make them
effectively equivalent. As practical individuals,
we are bound to continue to assume that
certain kinds of information are more access-
ible than others. I must necessarily treat a
photograph and a verbal description of the
same person in different ways, even if both are
subject to biases in my own perception.
Equally problematic are Holy and Stuchlik's
assertions that etic rules are 'no more than' the
emic rules of the ethnographer. This may be
true in one sense, but it is also misleading. If
everything that is said in this volume about the
difficulties of inferring 'folk models' is true,
then etic rules are the only ones we can begin to
place any confidence in. We can still be cultural
relativists (if that is what we want) and main-
tain the necessity of employing a specialised
and explicit set of assumptions and procedures
for observation, data collection, explanation
and verification. However, to claim that these
should be treated no differently from the
content of emic utterances is absurd; and, if
indigenous explanations of the world ar,e_con-
sistently different, it is not unreasonable to
regard them as 'false', judged from our agreed
datum of comparison. This is not to denigrate
folk explanations, nor to deny their rationality,
nor to claim that they are not an 'indivisible
part of the reality we are studying' (p. io).
RoY ELLEN
University of Kent
INGOLD, TiM. Hunters, pastoralists and ranchers:
reindeer economies and their transformations
(Camb. Pap. social Anthrop.). x, 326 pp.,
illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press,
I980. ?12.50
aim of this book is to characterise the
various forms of reindeer-based economy
found in the Old and New Worlds, and to
account for the transformation of certain of
these economies from hunting to pastoralism
and, more recently, from pastoralism to ranch-
ing. To supplement his own field experience
among the Lapps, Ingold has made a careful
study of the ethnography of Arctic and sub-
Arctic peoples and, although his coverage does
not extend to the Russian language sources,
this book will be of considerable use as an
ecologically oriented survey of this region.
However, as the author himself states in his
preface, this is really more of an 'ideas' book
than a 'facts' book, and very interesting ideas
they are too. The thread of Ingold's argument
is a largely deductive one and is based on a
series of careful conceptual distinctions be-
tween predation and protection of herds;