Mike Zang - Let's talk anthropology!

Oh Nebulous Rationality!


So in El Hadidi's ANTH 330 Health and Healing, a major underlying topic of contention is the arbitrary line between what society deems rational and irrational. And the more we discuss these "irrational mental disorders" in that class, the more I can apply C.S. Lewis's open-ended account of rationality.

Since reading Fischer's article on narration, I have become progressively aware of it's pertinance to my current studies in anthropology. Fischer's argument for an anti-rational paradigm flushes the cultural dichotomy between rational and irrational that individuals help creating and perpetuating. He terms the antipodes as "rational-world paradigm" and "narrative paradigm". Each side maintains its own idea of how to employ good reasoning, "those elements that provide warrants for adhering to advice fostered by any form of communication that can be considered rhetorical" (3).

Well then, as much as we as Westerners like to glorify our premeditated, super-honed and logistical acts of rationale, we must step eons back and understand what cultural anthropology has to say. In America, those who subscribe to a rational-world paradigm conspicuously and inconspicously demand for a certain way to comprehend the world, and subsequently construct a formalized set of ways to think and act based upon such assumptions. These pervasive notions however do not stem from some objective, extrinsic, Platonic archetype of What is Rational. Rather, they have been culturally constructed, thus making our condemnations of the more "irrational" perspectives (i.e. narrative paradigmers) completely illegitmate, founded upon an inexistent foundation. Scientific's supposed objectivism through empirism should not be jettisoned entirely, but as a "rational" culture we must really recognize that what we deem "irrational" may be curtailing the endless spectrum of thoughts and emotions that are possible within the human palette.

But although this culturally relative approach often degrades the inherent uniqueness of all myths, I find it equally important to adopt the phenomenological aspect of experience and understand that each person or groups interpretation of the immanent world is truly REAL and has a valid place in humanity. In other words, just because ideas of rationality vary across cultures does not suggest that they are all frauds. No! What anthropology and phenomenology seek to disperse is the simple "to each his/her own" adage. What is real within Lewis's myths is truly REAL to those who subscribe to it; that good reasoning and ideology is totally legit. However, it is when one myth (Western rationale in this case) begins discriminating and drawing arbitrary lines between what is rational versus irrational, then we have a problem.

The subjects in our anthro texts, in my opinion, are only suffering from "irrational mental disorders" of manic depression/biploarism because the analytic, rational-world doctors and psychologists command it.

I leave you with a reflection-worthy quote:
"The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." -John Milton's Paradise Lost