Between Poetry and Science

As promised, this first substantive (if brief) blog post will simply try to record a question that emerged during the introductory class meeting for "Culture":

Within anthropology, how has the relationship between the projects of representing culture and understanding culture been understood at different points of time? How much weight has been given to one over the other? Does the answer to this question vary across the American, British, or Continental traditions? Here representing culture refers to the production of a portrait of a society and its members, whether in the form of description and personal narrative in the voice of ethnographer or via the inclusion of poetry, narrative, folklore, or spoken discourse from native informants. Understanding culture refers to the discovery and explanation of some aspect or other of social life via the development of interpretive or explanatory hypotheses and their subsequent validation or falsification.

Thanks to Charlie for raising this question, which seems to me to get at one of the constitutive tensions that animates anthropology as a discipline poised between the humanities and the social sciences. Of course, this was just one of several interesting contributions that were made at our first meeting. To those of you whose recollections are still fresh: please consider taking a few moments to post them here.