The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  As befits those who deal with reflexivity, ethnomethodologists have had some amusing encounters with tricksters. Garfinkel was one of the faculty members who approved Carlos Castaneda’s Ph.D. dissertation. But this was not the only instance of his being duped in the course of his professional work.

  The longest chapter in Studies in Ethnomethodology was devoted to “Agnes” who was born a boy. At puberty he developed no facial hair, and his breasts began to enlarge. Garfinkel became interested for theoretical reasons. He hypothesized that a person strives to develop a clearly defined sex role because that is what others expect, and by conforming to those expectations, social life becomes easier. Garfinkel spent time interviewing Agnes in order to illuminate that process. Agnes then underwent surgery to remove her penis and become a woman.

  The medical doctors and Garfinkel believed that the condition was congenital, but unbeknownst to them, the boy had regularly stolen Stilbestrol from his mother, and taken it for years. His gender ambiguity was intentionally induced. Agnes had chosen to be sexually ambiguous for years. All this was discovered after Garfinkel wrote his book, and it falsified his hypothesis in a very embarrassing way.

  Mehan and Wood’s The Reality of Ethnomethodology is not completely free from gullibility either. It favorably cites Castaneda and another hoax-like work, Keep the River on Your Right by Tobias Schneebaum. Schneebaum told a story of Akarama tribesmen in South American engaging in homosexual activity and cannibalism, which anthropologists knew were not part of their tradition. In any event, Schneebaum dropped strong hints that the book should not be taken as fully factual, and Mehan and Wood should have recognized them, but they didn’t. Richard de Mille revealed the embarrassing mistake in his highly entertaining and instructive anthology The Don Juan Papers (1980). He showed Schneebaum’s account was largely fantasy, and he also included a statement by Schneebaum, essentially admitting as much. Despite such slips by Mehan and Wood, I highly recommend their volume, though I suggest reading in it conjunction with de Mille’s.

  These three embarrassments for ethnomethodology—”Agnes,” Schneebaum, and Castaneda—have clear trickster and liminal elements. The Anges and Schneebaum cases involved deception and sexual ambiguity. The Castaneda affair, by far the most famous, highlighted deception and the paranormal. It seems no accident that they were found with ethnomethodology, a reflexive discipline.

  Several important themes coincide in early ethnomethodology: tricksters, leveling of status, participation, and challenges to foundational assumptions.

  Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)

  The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) also confronts reflexivity. It is a relatively new branch of science, emerging in the last 30 years, and many of the prominent SSK practitioners reside in Britain. It contrasts with older versions of sociology of science, which studied scientists, their institutions, and their social relations. SSK goes further and explores the nature, content, and truth of scientific knowledge. Social Studies of Science is the leading journal of the field; it has covered reflexivity and occasionally discussed parapsychology.

  Researchers in SSK often take an ethnographic approach; they are more likely to conduct case studies rather than using survey questionnaires, which are more detached and distancing vis-à-vis the subjects. The practitioners sometimes become participant observers involved with the day-to-day activities of scientific laboratories. With this firsthand knowledge, they don’t have to rely on scientists’ interpretations and explanations of how they establish facts. Instead, the sociologists develop their own understanding of the process. Steve Woolgar, a leading figure in SSK, says that SSK researchers: “adopted the stance of an anthropologist joining a strange tribe, engaging in prolonged participant observation … This afforded the possibility of being deliberately sceptical about just those knowledge claims which seemed most evident and obvious to members of the tribe.”

  Of course sociologists who discuss the “truth” of scientific knowledge appropriate the customary roles of laboratory scientists and philosophers. SSK practitioners assert that scientific facts are socially constructed, and some even challenge the philosophical idea of “fact.” This is consistent with strains of postmodernism, and SSK is associated with relativist perspectives; it opposes positivist, realist, and objectivist positions in the philosophy of science. Needless to say, SSK has sparked considerable debate and antagonism.

  SSK innately involves reflexivity, and a number of its practitioners have addressed the topic. Ashmore’s already-mentioned book The Reflexive Thesis falls within the field, but he was not the only one to cover the issue. Steve Woolgar edited a volume entitled Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge (1988) with a number of useful contributions. The reader should be warned that the SSK discussions of reflexivity are formidable; they invoke such concepts as similarity, distance, and representation. They tread into arid philosophical areas where it is difficult to grasp any substance. Yet the articles are worth the effort, because the patterns and insights they identify can be overlooked when contemplating matters that are more concrete.

  Two essays in Knowledge and Reflexivity are of particular interest: one by Woolgar and another by Bruno Latour. Neither is easy to summarize.

  Representation and status are inherently part of the scientific process. Woolgar explained that a physicist tries to objectively describe (represent) electrons; he is “distant” from them. Similarly, an ethnographer portrays an exotic primitive people; the more exotic they appear, the more distant they are. The ethnographer and the primitive (like the physicist and electron) share little in common. Both the physicist and ethnographer seem “objective,” and their accounts are privileged and taken as true by readers. This is illustrated when an ethnographer’s explanation of primitives’ “superstitious” behavior is accepted as correct, but the primitives’ own understanding is ignored.

  The physicist and ethnographer enjoy a higher status than the objects of their inquiry.

  Participation is of theoretical interest in SSK. In much of sociology, participant-observation is carried out among marginal or low-status groups such as religious cults, the poor, or ethnic minorities. Sociologists dare not undertake comparable research with bankers, CEOs, or college presidents. Likewise, anthropologists may study primitive peoples, i.e., socially distant and “inferior.” However with SSK, there is not so much social distance between the observers and the observed. In fact the status of the objects of study may equal or exceed that of the researcher, at least initially. Scientists traditionally are assumed to be the final arbiters of scientific knowledge. But when they become objects of study and are described (represented) by sociologists, their legitimacy and reliability are called into question. Sociologists demonstrate that scientists are not as objective and rational as many people thought and that they are influenced by subjective and social factors in evaluating data. This naturally calls into question the authority, objectivity, and rationality of science, and it has the potential of reducing the status of scientists. As in liminality, there is a leveling or even inversion of status. Again we see the connection between reflexivity, status reduction, and participation—a connection also found in ethnomethodology. It is no accident that participation arose in Levy-Bruhl’s discussions of primitive mentality. Participation raises issues not only of status but also of the basis of rationality. These are discomforting matters, and Woolgar admitted that “Most social scientists tend to steer well clear of any sustained examination of the significance of reflexivity, despite frequently acknowledging its relevance in , „20 general terms.”

  Bruno Latour’s essay in Knowledge and Reflexivity, “The Politics of Explanation: An Alternative,” holds a number of insights about information, abstraction, and explanation. Latour is from France, and the influence of French philosophy is apparent in his writing. Among other things, he explains why Garfinkel and the deconstructionists are so hard to understand, a charge that more than one commentator has made a
gainst Latour himself. Impenetrability is a frequent consequence of reflexivity, so here I will not try to summarize his presentation, but only his conclusions.

  Latour concludes that when reflexivity is applied on a limited basis in the academic enterprise, it is often sterile and leads to little productivity. However he suggests that greater application of it should produce interdisciplinary pollination. Hybridization and increased

  understanding across academic boundaries should result. I was very pleased to see this conclusion, because my own readings convinced me that an interdisciplinary approach was required to make progress with the topic of reflexivity (and of psychic phenomena). His explicit mention of “boundaries” (and their disruption) confirms the importance of them for understanding the repercussions of reflexivity. In short, La-tour’s essay marks him as a major theorist of the topic.

  Replication of scientific experiments is one of the thorny problems tackled by SSK. It is a foundational issue of science. Most scientists accept the simple idea that valid experiments must be repeatable by others. But when the matter is closely examined, all sorts of complexities arise. What is replication? Who determines whether it is accomplished? How is it described? In controversial areas, simply doing more experiments doesn’t resolve issues about putative effects; there are continuing arguments about what is required for a satisfactory experiment. Slight changes in conditions may have important consequences, and those can be debated endlessly. Conducting more experiments can lead to what has been termed the “experimenter’s regress.” Do objective observations establish fact, or is it only social agreement? Further, written reports are not always sufficient to explain an experiment’s procedure. Sometimes direct personal training is required to teach the skill and convey the necessary information for successful replication. Abstract text is inadequate. SSK raises all these issues, and in a subtle but profound way it strikes a blow against the foundational myth that science is a fully objective process.

  Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch are two of the leading sociologists who have investigated replication, and their work features prominently in both Ashmore’s and Woolgar’s books on reflexivity. Collins and Pinch are of added interest, because they have also studied the paranormal. In fact four of their books on sociology discuss parapsychology: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Source Book (1982), Frames of Meaning (1982), Changing Order (1985), and The Golem (1993). Additionally, they have written on CSICOP, and relatively early in his career Collins even carried out an investigation of psychic metal bending by children. He took part in a 1986 symposium sponsored by the Parapsychology Foundation, contributing a paper entitled “Scientific Knowledge and Scientific Criticism.” Parapsychology provided Collins and Pinch a natural choice for case material because replication has been a central issue in the field for decades.22

  With SSK, and especially with its attentiveness to reflexivity, we see a constellation of ideas: loss of status, participation, questioning of

  foundations, representation, and, as an apparent side issue, the paranormal. However abstractly formulated in SSK, these same matters lie at the heart of liminality and the trickster.

  Experimenter Effects in Psychology

  While Robert Rosenthal was analyzing an experiment for his Ph.D. dissertation in the mid-1950s, he was dismayed to discover that his data indicated that he had unintentionally biased his subjects (he had inadvertently “participated” in the experiment). This initially unwelcome discovery shaped his career, and he went on to study experimenter expectancy effects. After completing his doctorate, he conducted experiments with several lower echelon researchers. Each carried out the same procedure, but they were told to expect different results. Rosenthal demonstrated that significant biases could be thereby induced.23

  Experimenting on experimenters is innately reflexive, and it raises the question of whether experimenters can objectively investigate the world. How extreme are their biases? The philosophical point disconcerted many psychologists, and Rosenthal received some sharp criticisms. In addition, some researchers claimed that they were unable to repeat his results (the replication problem). In the end, Rosenthal largely prevailed, and experimenter expectancy effects are now accepted as real. Nevertheless, his work raises questions about the ultimate validity of experimentation, but as with ethnomethodology, the especially troubling ones, the true foundational issues, are largely ignored.

  Rosenthal went on to investigate how teachers’ expectancies influence their pupils. In a number of studies, grade school students were given an intelligence test, and afterwards teachers were told that some of them should intellectually bloom in the coming months. Unknown to the teachers, the “bloomers” were not selected by the test, but instead were designated randomly. Months later, another test was administered, and the randomly selected bloomers had increased their objective test scores more than the other students. Somehow the teachers had unconsciously transmitted their expectations to the students, who fulfilled them. This has sometimes been referred to as the

  24

  Rosenthal-Pygmalion effect. It attracted enormous attention (I remember my parents discussing it at the dinner table); it showed the relevance of psychological research in a way that everyone could understand.

  Rosenthal later became one of the pioneers in the development of meta-analysis, a procedure to quantitatively evaluate large numbers of statistically-based studies. Much early work with meta-analysis was done in psychology, and it is now frequently used in medicine and other fields.

  As in other instances of reflexivity, there is often a connection with the paranormal. This is true with Robert Rosenthal. In fact, the very first psychology experiment he conducted, while still in high school, was an ESP test, and he had even written to J. B. Rhine about it.25 This was not to be his only contact with the field. In the mid 1980s he was commissioned by the National Research Council (the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences) to provide a report on several areas of interest to the U.S. Army. When he came to positive conclusions about parapsychology, the NRC pressured him to remove that section. He refused, and they tried to suppress his findings.

  Meditation

  “Meditation” encompasses a wide range of practices; in some forms, a person may simply sit quietly with eyes closed and just observe what happens. Images, ideas, and feelings will emerge from the unconscious and display themselves to conscious awareness. Consciousness is used to observe consciousness, and thus the process is reflexive. Meditation blurs the area between the conscious and the unconscious.

  Daniel Goleman gives a very useful overview of meditation in his book The Meditative Mind (1988). Goleman taught at Harvard, wrote for the New York Times for twelve years covering behavioral and brain sciences, and he was author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence (1995). He also spent two years in the Far East studying meditation. Goleman distinguishes between concentration, “in which mind focuses on a fixed mental object” and mindfulness “in which mind observes itself.” Mindfulness fits the definition for being reflexive. Concentration though is not far removed from it. Mind observes a “mental object,” i.e., a product of mind; thus even in concentration, mind is inwardly attentive of itself.

  A number of meditative schools speak of encountering the void or the abyss. Malcolm Ashmore noted that those are other names for the problem of reflexivity. Adept meditators sometimes speak of the ineffable. Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach (1979) briefly discusses

  Zen, a meditative discipline, saying “Zen is the fight against reliance on words.” (The same issue is raised in other contexts in which reflexivity is engaged. The obscurity of the writings of Garfinkel and of the deconstructionists also challenges the hegemony of words.)

  Goleman reports that many traditions have warnings about the dangers of meditation and the need for purification before one engages in it. This signals a liminal, anti-structural domain, and this makes sense. In meditation, the outer physical world is disregarded. Its structure, order
, and routine no longer hold the conscious mind to the regularities of existence.

  Paranormal powers sometimes accompany meditative practice, and Goleman notes that they are explicitly addressed in the literature of the classical schools. Typically there are warnings against pursuing them; thus they are taboo within an already liminal domain. Meditation has had a long association with mysticism, and it is an integral part of mystical practice. Numerous mystics have displayed paranormal abilities. But the evidence regarding meditation and psi is not merely anecdotal. A number of laboratory studies have shown that meditation enhances ESP scoring in experimental tests.

  Like other liminal activities, meditation became prominent in the U.S. in the late 1960s and 1970s. That period saw the burgeoning interest in the paranormal (and the emergence of ethnomethodology, SSK, and deconstructionism). The Transcendental Meditation movement attracted the Beatles and a number of movie stars. Academe began to take notice, and in 1969 Charles Tart published the anthology Altered States of Consciousness. It became a widely used text, and it had a section devoted to meditation. Tart, by the way, has authored several books and many papers on parapsychology.

  In summary, meditation has a number of liminal features. It blurs the boundary between conscious and unconscious; its traditional schools warn of dangers; it is associated with mysticism and paranormal abilities. Many forms are inherently reflexive.

  Mathematical Logic

  Mathematical logic might seem to have little in common with sociology, meditation, or literary criticism, but reflexivity is found there as well. Kurt Godel, the foremost mathematical logician of the twentieth century, demonstrated the importance of reflexivity for mathematics. Born in Moravia in 1906, he attended the University of Vienna and took part in meetings of the Vienna Circle, a group of influential