The Postmodern Interpretation of Witchcraft

Apr 10th, 2011 | By Joshua Leach

Category: Articles

Today, the great wave of postmodernist and poststructuralist academic writing, with its
epistemological relativism and obfuscating rhetoric, has largely subsided. It may never
disappear, as few things do, and it may have become so thoroughly embedded in certain
disciplines as to color them for the foreseeable future. However, the vogue for discourses
and hermeneutics has largely passed its prime, and disciplines which once felt themselves
to be engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the new wave of academics (anthropology,
history, e.g.) now seem to be regaining their footing and reclaiming a scientific basis.

History cannot be written if we do not believe that any one narrative of the past is more
true than another, or that it is possible, despite the inevitable prejudice and short-
sightedness of the human mind, to gain a rough understanding of what actually occurred in
history and why. Of course, this is not an argument against the postmodernists. Whether
or not historians can justify their salaries has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the
postmodernists claims. What it does mean, however, is that there can be no such thing as a
truly postmodernist history, for such a history would have no reason to claim its narrative
of events was worth reading over any other, or more true than any other book on the
subject. And the only reason academic presses churn out books year after year is in the
hope, after all, that they contribute to the general store of knowledge in society.

Despite their apparent contradictions, however, postmodern histories have been

written. This article deals with one such attempt, The Witch in History (1996) by Diane
Purkiss. The work is a perfect representative sample of postmodern history because it (a) is
not written by a historian, and (b) does not make use of historical evidence to prove its
point (beyond three briefly dissected reports of early modern witch-trials). Purkiss
dismisses the vast body of literature on English witchcraft which preceded her with facile
psychological analyses of eminent historians such as Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, and
Norman Cohn, whom she accuses of being enthralled to Enlightenment scruples and
possibly misogynistic in their treatment of witchcraft. Keith Thomas 800-plus-page
masterpiece, Religion and the Decline of Magic, covers the entire early modern period of
English history and contains innumerable references to the entire corpus of witch trial
records that are available to us. Purkiss dismisses it not on the grounds of historical fact or
interpretation (her three trials are not offered in refutation of Thomas, apart from a snide
parenthetical remark which mentions him by name [1]) but rather on the grounds of
Thomas alleged Enlightenment bias, which is defined as necessarily male and elitist by
Purkiss.

Implied and sometimes explicitly stated throughout the book is the notion that witchcraft
might have truly existed, that we cannot discount the role of the supernatural in history, and
that the early modern view of magic is no less true, necessarily, than our own, for
nothing, after all, can be established objectively, if one ascribes to Purkiss philosophy.

To refute the limited historical arguments of Purkiss work is not hard to do, and Thomas
magisterial work stands as its own defense. Besides, Purkiss book was written more than a
decade ago now and often reads like a period piece of sortsa mixing of all the fads of the
academic culture of the 90s which seemed shocking and groundbreaking at the time but
now seem thoroughly vapid. Why, then, should we return to it now? What use is there is
refuting a book that has already been discredited and a fad that has already long since
fizzled out?

My answer is essentially that the books subject matter, witchcraft, remains a matter of life
and death in many parts of the world, and that the old battles of the skeptics and the witch-
hunters must be revisited and replayed as long as there are any intellectuals who defend the
possibility that witchcraft might really exist. The mere fact that in the recent past the
Academy was host to theories such as those of Purkiss is cause for concern.

Of course, Purkiss is not a defender of the witch-hunters, simply of their epistemological

worldview. Witchcraft may have existed, village women in the early modern period may
have exhibited supernatural powers, she claims, but they should not have been killed for
it. However, it is not much of a stretch to say that to argue that witchcraft and magic exist
is to empower those who persecute people in the name of stamping them out.

Today, a belief in witches persists in many parts of the world, including the United
States. Recent Delaware Senate candidate Christine ODonnell even felt the need to go on
television to insist that she was not a witch, although she dabbled in Wicca as a
teenager. Even in the twenty-first century, it would seem, we Americans need this type of
assurance (although I suppose with Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin in one place, the
Tea Party is starting to look like a Witchs Sabbath in its own right).

Less comically, witchcraft accusations are often the basis of collective violence in Sub-
Saharan Africa and Saudi Arabia (where the state still officially recognizes witchcraft as a
crime). The tragic persecution of Albinos in Tanzania and elsewhere, particularly children,
is generally tied to witch beliefs. The body parts of murdered Albinos are often used by
witchdoctors for their supposed magical properties, as documented by Amnesty
International [2], which has led to an underground trade in such gruesome artifacts and the
kidnapping and murder of innumerable people. While the government of Tanzania has
cracked down on such violence (often with methods nearly as brutal as that of the criminals
[3]), other African nations, such as the Gambia, have wedded the coercive apparatus of the
modern state to ancient witch beliefs with deadly results. In 2009, Amnesty International
documented the kidnapping and forced drugging of over 1000 people, most of them elderly
women, in a literal government witch-hunt [4].

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any avowal that witchcraft might exist, whatever its
intentions, provides legitimation for this sort of injustice. The discourse that states that
Albino body parts make for good magical amulets is not a perfectly acceptable alternative
to the discourse of scientific Enlightenment, with its naturalistic world-view and
emphasis on human rights. The one is not only deadly but demonstrably false; the other is
the only force which allows us to successfully defend the victims of social paranoia and
collective delusion.

This is the most important reason for arguing against Purkiss, even at this late date. The
other is that Purkiss book, whatever its relative insignificance as a single volume, can be
used as a stand-in for a wide-variety of new forces which in the last thirty years or so have
challenged history as a discipline and made the task of discovering objective truth in the
past much more difficult. The phenomenon has been dealt with at length elsewhere by a
variety of historians: see Richard Evans In Defense of History and Eric Hobsbawms
lecture on The New Threat to History [5] for some of the best accounts of the problem.

We can, however, offer the broad outlines of what took place. Following the postmodern
lefts demolition of the notion of objective truth in the past, various nationalist, chauvinist
and identity-group histories have appeared, all benefitting from the general relaxation of
empirical standards in history. History may never be an exact science, but in the past, it
was taken for granted that it would be conducted within a certain methodological
framework. After this framework was ridiculed by the postmodernists, it was only a matter
of time before Hindu nationalists in India would start removing all mention of the caste
system and the cultural achievements of the Mughal rulers from school textbooks, identity
groups would begin falsifying the record of history to suit the interests of group members,
and so on. Today, the American Right has caught on in a big way to the advantages of
making up history as one pleases: it can be seen offering a steady stream of historical
obfuscation and misinformation, all of it in popular texts like Jonah Goldbergs Liberal
Fascism which reach a much wider audience than any scholarly histories ever could.

The new rules of history, with their tendency to dismiss ones opponents without debate
and denigrate ones colleagues on the basis of spurious personal or political accusations,
certainly originated on the Left. But they have now, predictably, been picked up by the
Right as the perfect excuse for self-congratulatory escapism. They offer a way of cleansing
the record of whatever nation, religion, or culture group they seek to apologize for.

Because Purkiss book belongs to the period and the movement which bequeathed to us this
enormous historical catastrophe, we are justified in returning to it now and attempting to
undo some of the damage it has wrought.

Purkiss is chiefly arguing against those skeptical narratives which divided modernity from
the rural past, and scientific skill from supernatural and providential narrations. In other
words, she is opposed to the Enlightenment narrative that stresses a growing awareness of
scientific fact in the modern world and a displacement of earlier magical paradigms. She
claims that such narratives did great violence to the actual stories told by early modern
people [6]. That is, by denying the truth claims of the villagers who claimed that Mrs. So-
and-So had given them the Evil Eye and that Mr. X had turned into a toad and back again
(as one freely-given English confession maintained [7]), modern historians who doubt the
plausibility of witchcraft and the supernatural are belittling early modern people and their
view of the world. They are offering an elitist version of events which discounts the views
of those ordinary people in favor of scientific rationality. And how arrogant of them, after
all, when everyone knows that truth is relative and that there is no such thing as objective
fact! Purkiss everywhere places the word truth in question-begging quotation marks,
saying for instance that she is not particularly interested in the truth of various
figurations of the witch [8]. Empiricism, and the whole notion of truth itself, she claims,
is justly under attack from both poststructuralist theory and postmodern reality [9].

Purkiss is blissfully unaware of the many inconsistencies into which this position forces
her. She is perfectly happy, for instance, to quote historical facts and statistics when they
serve the purpose of her argument. If she doesnt believe these facts to be true, then how
can she use them to buttress her claims? She describes herself as a feminist historian, yet
among her rhetorical enemies are the radical feminists of the 1970s, who preceded
Purkiss more advanced form of feminism, dared to insist on certain eternal verities
rather than postmodern relativism, and took a hard-line stance against pornography, a
position which Purkiss seems to regard as self-evidently absurd. The chief antagonist here
is Barbara Ehrenreichs Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, a book which offers clear
oppositions between misogynistic witch-hunters in the Inquisition and innocent healers
and midwives, persecuted for their secret feminine knowledge which was threatening to the
elites of the time [10]. Ehrenreichs narrative certainly deserves to be challenged on
historical grounds, as Purkiss proceeds to do. She points to the fact that there was no
necessary or statistically significant correlation between midwives and those persecuted for
witchcraft. She also points out that the Spanish Inquisition was actually comparatively
lenient in dealing with witchcraft cases [11], though as another historian has pointed out,
this was generally because they were so busy persecuting Jews and Moors that they were
content to leave the witches to the secular authorities! [12].

These are all legitimate uses of historical evidence and constitute a clear contribution to an
ongoing historical debate. However, why Purkiss should appeal to facts here when she
supposedly does not believe they exist is less clear, unless one attributes it to sheer
unabashed inconsistency.

Purkiss argument ultimately seems to be that the factual accuracy of any historical claim is
irrelevant: what matters is the emotional satisfaction it provides. Feminist historians may,
according to her, use the figure of the witch to fill their own emotional needs, but so too do
male historians who write on the subject [13]. These, she laments, dominate the field of
English witchcraft studies, in which no female scholar has written a major study [14].

Purkiss chief objects of scorn are Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, whom she
forgivably lumps together as representing the currently orthodox position in English
witchcraft studies. These two worked closely with and influenced one another, and were
among the first historians to apply anthropological methods to the study of the past,
particularly the work of social anthropologists such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard on the
phenomenon of witchcraft. Less forgivably, Purkiss accuses these historians of having in
their work created a narcissistic myth, which shapes them as skeptical empiricists,
confirming their academic identities[15]. This is the hidden agenda [16] of academic
work in the field: to portray early modern people as primitive and gullible and thereby
elevate the historian to the status of heroic crusader for enlightenment.
Of course, every historian has personal motives for investigating a certain region of the
past. No doubt many historians of witchcraft are drawn to the subject out of compassion
for the victims of the persecution and disgust with the bigotry of the time. To tell the
stories of the otherwise forgotten victims of past injustices, to rescue the poor and
oppressed from what E.P. Thompson once called the enormous condescension of
posterity, is one of the most important moral tasks of the historian. If some historians
would like to ease the burden of painstaking research that must go into such endeavors by
reminded themselves of the limited sort of heroism to which they can lay claim, this should
not surprise or bother us.

However, this is very different from saying that the mere existence of these personal
motives nullifies the claim to scientific accuracy of the historian, as Purkiss does. Not only
is she intensely presumptuous in her claim to be able to divine the motives of Thomas and
Macfarlane in their writing of history, she also offers absolutely no historical evidence to
question their statements. The mere fact of their being male empiricists is enough in her
eyes to make them guilty by association. Most outrageously, given Keith Thomas
outspoken feminism, Purkiss implicitly accuses the two historians of misogyny. She comes
up time and again with bizarre statements like this one: Enlightenment thought has
always offered a way to seize and clutch and penetrate the mystery of the feminine
otherness [17]. We are left with an image of the bookish, near-sighted Keith Thomas as
the unforgiving rapist of the early modern period.

Reginald Scot, the early modern skeptic and opponent of witch-hunting, is portrayed by
Purkiss as a hero to Thomas, for he echoed Thomas variety of misogyny. He too doubted
the supernatural power of elderly village women and claimed that such women were
probably just batty old things rather than witchesthat they most likely suffered from
mental illness rather than demonic possession. Purkiss bemoans the fact that Thomas takes
a similar view of the women accused of witchcraft. He portrays them as most often victims
of mental illnesspoor, maligned, cast out, and victimized by village societycertainly
not supernatural entities capable of calling on Satanic powers. Purkiss, however, finds this
view sexist. Where [Thomas, Scot, etc.] deny the witch all supernatural power, [they also]
deny her all social and cultural power [18].

Of course, the blunt fact of the matter is that most women accused of witchcraft did not
have any social or cultural power to start with: it was their powerlessness which left them
open to victimization. To make this point is not sexist any more than it is a form of class
discrimination to say that the poor and victimized are indeed poor and victimized. Thomas
describes long-standing village beliefs in the efficacy of verbal cursing, a practice which
often became the only means available to poor old people and beggars of exacting revenge
on society [19]. The sight of such lonely old folk muttering anathemas under their breath
played on social fears: it was no great leap from this to the notion that such people must be
witches and that they ought to be persecuted. Thomas also systematically documents the
motives of those men and women who freely confessed to acts of witchcraft rather than
being forced to do so under torture. All of them were incredibly poor, and all profoundly
disaffected and alienated from the society around them. Many poor folk were simply
drawn to the Devil by the promise of measly material rewards (one woman claimed to have
sold her soul to the Devil for two and sixpence [20]). For all such individuals, the Devil
had a sort of subjective reality. He was a way of personifying their own evil thoughts
and feelings of worthlessness, of giving their execration of society tangible form [21].

The examples offered by Thomas are copious enough and do not need repeating, especially
since Purkiss shows no sign of actually doubting Thomas research on any point. All of
this adds up to a very weak and unconvincing argument on Purkiss part. I wonder if Keith
Thomas was ever even made aware of the bizarre scouring his personal life and motivations
received in this bookit did not, to my knowledge, provoke much scholarly reaction or
interest when it appeared. Richard Evans makes use of it, in his In Defense of History, as a
representative sample of postmodernist balderdash, but other than that, the book was hardly
taken seriously.

Of course, I can hear Purkiss objections now were she to read this article. One sentence of
her book leapt out at me as I was researching this article and struck a note with my guilty
conscience: Historians of witchcraft, she writes, often set themselves up via the ritual
slaughter of a rival academic who has allowed herself to become indivisible from witch-
beliefs [22].

Of course, Purkiss has herself become indivisible from witch-beliefs. And though Im
hardly a rival academic to anyone, I can easily imagine the sort of pseudo-psychological
dissection Purkiss would give my foregoing article. She would no doubt see me as another
would-be Enlightenment hero trying to combat feminine irrationality.

Every closed system of thought has its own means of turning any criticism against
itself. Just as Stalinists were once in the habit of accusing their critics of being motivated
exclusively by class prejudice, postmodern relativists are able to absorb all criticism
because they make no effort to refute itthey simply claim to divine the hidden sexist or
racist agenda of the critic and thereby render everything she says irrelevant and senseless.

The essence of a closed system of thought is that it can neither be proven nor refuted: such
is the case with relativism. It thrives on circular logic and turns all possible refutations
back in upon themselves. We cannot hope to ever argue relativism out of existence,
because ultimately, we cannot prove that our knowledge of the world is accurate. We could
simply be imaginary critters in the solipsistic brain of some demon who has thought us into
existencewho knows?

What we do know is that Enlightenment rationality offers a way of ordering our

experiences in a way that is useful. It is also capable of changing and reshaping the
worldview it provides in response to new information. Relativism and other closed systems
of thought can do no such thing, by definition.

We also know that to undo the work of Enlightenment rationality, and to reopen the door to
the possibility of the truth of witchcraft and supernatural power, is to play a dangerous
game. Open that door too far, and one lets in a host of unwanted reminders of the past: the
witch-doctors and Inquisitors, the torturers and kidnappers: in a word, all those tormenters
of the innocent, poor, and socially maligned who in the West we take to be a relic of the
past. We should take the time to remember that they still exist to this day wherever a
widespread belief in the reality of witchcraft persists.

REFERENCES

[1] Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (Routledge 1996), 95.

[2] http://www.amnestyusa.org/all-countries/tanzania/page.do?id=1011252

[3] http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGNAU2009110313864&lang=e

[4] http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/gambia-hundreds-accused-
%E2%80%9Cwitchcraft%E2%80%9D-and-poisoned-government-campaign-20

[5] E.J. Hobsbawm, The New Threat to History, The New York Review of Books.
December 16, 1993.

[6] Purkiss, 3

[7] Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1971),
517.

[8] Purkiss, 10

[9] ibid, 61.

[10] ibid, 8.

[11] ibid.

[12] H.R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (Macmillan, 1967), 111.

[13] Purkiss, 10

[14] ibid, 59.

[15] ibid, 60.

[16] ibid, 61.

[17] ibid, 63.

[18] ibid, 66.

[19] Thomas, 509.

[20] ibid, 520-21.

[21] ibid.

[22] Purkiss, 62.

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Witchcraft Accusations and Politics in Akwa Ibom State

22 Responses to The Postmodern Interpretation of Witchcraft

#1

SAWells

April 11, 2011 at 3:03 am

So essentially the book should have been called The witch not in history or The
witch in my head?

#2

Primer on Anti-Reason | Understood Backwards

April 28, 2011 at 8:23 pm

[] I thought Id post a counterpoint to my previous post about critical thinking.

Joshua Leach at Butterflies and Wheels reviews a post-modernist history book
about witchcraft in England, which was written by Diane []

#3

jri
 May 8, 2011 at 5:29 am

I was going to read this review, but couldnt get past the second paragraph. Aside
from yet another tired and shopworn fulmination against postmodernism (I mean,
you would think uninformed anti-postmodernism rants would have run their course
too!), there is this:History cannot be written if we do not believe that any one
narrative of the past is more true than another, or that it is possible, despite the
inevitable prejudice and short-sightedness of the human mind, to gain a rough
understanding of what actually occurred in history and why.

That certainly does sound bad. But nobody holds these positions; theyre a
ridiculous caricature of so-called postmodernism. You would think that someone
who is ostensibly so devoted to objective intellectual standards would want, at the
least, to have a basic understanding of what he sets out to criticize.

#4

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 8:26 am

Well if you had bothered to read past the second para you would have found an
example of someone who does hold those views, or at least did hold them when she
wrote the book in question. Your intervention would have been more convincing
if you had read, say, five paragraphs instead of two.

#5

jri

May 8, 2011 at 11:10 am

Um, I read the review. But you will still need to kindly direct me to the example
of Purkiss stating the absurd views I quoted from Leach. The fact that he ascribes
such views to her doesnt make it so.

#6

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 11:35 am

 See para 4 for example.

The sentence you quoted is a generalization, and the review goes into detail that
supports the generalization.

#7

jri

May 8, 2011 at 11:43 am

Seriously? Paragraph 4 is also a generalization, its assertions nowhere explicitly

substantiated (implied and sometimes explicitly stated? where? Leach doesnt
say). Which was my original point: the sentence I quoted is not only a
generalization, but a terribly inaccurate one, and likewise unsubstantiated. Or are
only postmodernists held to rigorous evidentiary standards?

#8

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 2:09 pm

Its perfectly normal to start with generalization and then proceed to particulars.
Your claims are assertions themselves.

#9

jri

May 8, 2011 at 2:56 pm

Wow. You appear to be deliberately pretending not to hear what I am saying. I

know my claims are assertions (arent those synonyms?). And I know its normal
to start with generalizations and move to particulars. I did not say otherwise. What I
said is that the generalizations/assertions Leach makes in the sentence I quoted are
(a) ridiculous distortions; and (b) unsupported by any particulars in the rest of the
review. So let me try again.

My simple and narrow point from the start was that nobody holds the position that
no one narrative of the past is more true than another. Thats just silly. Of
 course, if it helps, I will concede that there is probably someone, somewhere who
believes such a thing. But to pretend that that is the consensus view or even a
widely held view on the part of a bunch of postmodernists in the academy is
absurd and Im pretty sure you know very well that its absurd. Next, my further
point implied by my joke, perhaps not very funny, about not reading the rest of
Leachs review was that its hard to take seriously anyone who begins a review
with such a straw woman.Finally, it is true, obviously, that my saying that Leachs
assertion is a monstrous perversion is itself an assertion. But the burden of proof in
this instance is not on me to prove that negative; its on Leach, the person who
made the claim in the first place.

#10

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 3:04 pm

No, I dont know that its absurd. There are, or at least have been, academics who
claim that. Cf Why Truth Matters, Continuum 2006.

#11

jri

May 8, 2011 at 3:20 pm

I am aware of the book, but have not read it. Still, I am dubious about this particular
claim and fear that if you promote it in your book, you likewise engage in some
unfortunate distortions. At any rate, I would think that, as the author, you might
have an example or two ready at hand. Id sure like to see these rare and exotic
creatures. Also, am I to assume by simply recommending your book, you concede
my point that Leachs claims are unsubstantiated? Or does truth (or at least
supporting evidence) somehow not matter in book reviews at Butterflies and
Wheels?

#12

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 3:38 pm

 Be dubious all you want. Just dont skip the notes.

The book came out five years ago; no, even as one of the authors, I dont have an
example or two ready at hand. No I dont concede your point I know what kind of
thing he is referring to, so I think what he says about Purkisss book is illustrative,
and sufficient substantiation.

There just are epistemic relativists in the world. Its not my fault that youve never
encountered any.

#13

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 3:39 pm

I tell you what though read some Sandra Harding. That should satisfy you.

#14

jri

May 8, 2011 at 3:46 pm

Of course you dont concede it because apparently unsupported claims are just fine
so long as they are ones you agree with. And Ive just taken a quick peek/ search of
your book on Google and, near as I can tell, you dont have any specific examples
either (admittedly and obviously, I could be wrong), but some citations of the same
people Leach cites in his review. One would think that it would be quite easy to
produce examples of something so dangerous, alarming, and pervasive!

Sandra Harding, okay. Theres one. We shall see.

#15

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 4:07 pm

I didnt say it was pervasive. I think its probably going out of style. That does not
mean there never was such a thing.
 Id like you to be a good deal less rude from now on.

#16

Ophelia Benson

May 8, 2011 at 4:08 pm

And while youre being a good deal less rude, keep in mind that youre anonymous.
Its so easy to be pissy when there will be no consequences. Be civil or go away.

#17

jri

May 9, 2011 at 4:15 am

Okay, my last comment might have been a teeny bit pissy (please accept my
apology), but otherwise I have been quite civil, especially given how frustrating this
exchange has been. I simply challenged a claim in a book review. You are
defending that claim. I have (repeatedly) asked for specific evidence and/or example
in support of it a not unreasonable request. You have not been able to produce any,
either within or without the review, with the exception of the name Sandra Harding
(Ill look into it), although you insist that there just are such people, an argument I
doubt youd accept in many other contexts (God just does exist. Its not my fault
youve never encountered Him.).

I honestly am not trying to be combative or rude. But I am likely to away soon.

#18

jri

May 9, 2011 at 5:14 am

Okay, this is likely to be it from me (Im sure youll be relieved). And let me
preface it by saying that I wound up here by mere happenstance. I clicked on a link
at Bookforum. Ive got nothing invested in Purkiss or in hectoring you. But I am
deeply, deeply irritated by tiresome, poorly informed and/or distorted fulminations
against monolithic academic postmodernism (this sort of thing hs been going on
for a good 20 years now and shows no signs of slowing, as Leachs review makes
 quite clear). I also have no strong commitment to postmodernism, postcolonialism,
or most other isms although Ive learned from (and, yes, disagreed with) many of
the writers and thinkers associated with them.

So heres my (probable) last point. I looked at a bit of Sandra Harding and was
quite surprised at what I found. For one thing, she clearly is not someone who
makes the sort of claim that started all of this (Leachs perverse no one narrative of
the past is more true than any other). I take it that you mentioned her instead as a
more general example of an epistemic relativist. But thats odd, too, since from
what little I read, shes very explicit on this point. Heres a taste:

Does using postcolonial and feminist standpoints necessarily decreast the

objectivity of the arguments that follow? Does it commit this study to a relativist
position? For many readers, these may seem like the necessary consequence of
abandoning the familiar internalist epistemology and framing this work within
postcolonial feminisms. However, they would be wrong to draw such a conclusion.
Instead, this study is committed to strengthening the objectivity of understandings
of modern sciences and technologies (18)

Her approach rejects the epistemological or judgmental relativism that assumes

that because all such assumptions and claims have local, historical components,
there is no rational, defensible way to evaluate them. It rejects the idea that all
claims are equally valid, that all cultures science and technology projects are
equally definsible, or any and all purposes. It rejects the assumption that if one
recognizes the social, historical relativism of knowledge claims, on is forced to
epistemological, judgmental relativism (19).

Not all proposed standards for knowledge are equally good indeed, some are not
only inadequate, but dangerous to their believers lives (20).

This is all from Is Science Multicultural (Indiana UP, 1998). And then theres this
from Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (1991; ch. 6 appear to be devoted
entirely to the relativism question):

To acknowledge [the local character of practices and beliefs, ie cultural

relativism] does not commit one to the further epistemological claim that there
are therefore no rational or scientific grounds for making judgments about patterns
of belief and their originating social practices, values, and consequences (152).

So in other words, the one example that you have given me of an epistemic
relativist turns out to be someone who very explicitly and carefully disavows
epistemological relativism. You can imagine my confusion.

#19
 Ophelia Benson

May 9, 2011 at 8:32 am

Harding says things that have a very different tendency in other places. WTM cites
some.

Youre irritated by tiresome, poorly informed and/or distorted fulminations against

monolithic academic postmodernism; fine; but Im not in fact badly informed on
the subject. You could find considerable documentation right on this site via the
search box; or you could find it in WTM.

Im somewhat irritated by defenders of postmodernism who simply assume that

critics are badly informed.

#20

jri

May 9, 2011 at 9:10 am

I have not said that you are misinformed. I have said, however, that based upon his
review, Leach appears rather badly misinformed. And I fear, based on this
exchange, my brief reading of Harding, and a little skimming of WTM that you
might have a tendency to distort. I have, at every turn, made the effort honestly to
seek out whatever little crumbs youve been willing to toss my way as evidence in
support of the claims I am challenging and that you are defending. Yet I also cant
help but think that, as someone who is not in fact misinformed, it really shouldnt be
this hard just to get a straightforward example or two from you. I mean, it only took
me about 15 minutes at Google books to generate counter-examples (which is not
what I set out to do, by the way; I was just reading) from the one concrete source
you did give me. It appears that I have no choice but to give up.

#21

Ophelia Benson

May 9, 2011 at 9:43 am

 Its not difficult but it is time-consuming, and believe it or not, I have other things to
do than convince people one at a time. As I said: you could just use the search box
here.

#22

Ian MacDougall

May 31, 2011 at 10:36 pm

For an interesting and highly critical slant on pomo, see here .

It was written by the noted Sydney bookseller, the late Bob Gould.