On a university campus students quickly learn that science is all about making decisions based on fixed standards, measurements, and constants. But the same cannot be said of the Liberal Art departments which includes fields of study like anthropology, sociology, religion, history, psychology, economics, political science, semantics, and, missiology.

 

This is troubling for social scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists, as well as missiologists, who all see the need for fixed constants for judging the validity of a value, custom, tradition, concept, or rule, but wonder where they can be found.

 

Now there were two intellectual giants who were aware of the need. One was a linguist, the other, an anthropologist.  The linguist was a theist. HIs name was Kenneth Pike.  The other was a committed materialist. His name was Marvin Harris.

 

Interestingly, it was Pike, the theist, who introduced to the academic world the idea of an unlearned Universal Interpretative System consisting of "etic data" aka Universal Ideas, Values, and Principles structured in the unconscious mind which could be triggered and brought to consciousness in a socio-linguistic situation.  If true, it meant these fixed, Universal Ideas, Values, and Principles were discoverable.

 

Concerning the existence of such innate data, the apostle Paul wrote: “They show [by their behavior] that God's law is not something alien, imposed on us from without, but is woven into the very fabric of our creation” (Romans 2:15  --The Message). 

 

What was “woven into the very fabric of our creation" was a Universal Interpretative System. This frame of reference consisted of Ideas or Forms common to all to which were “linked” inherent meanings, meanings which were fixed and constant. Pike called such information "etic data.”  

 

For Pike, this etic data or set of fixed concepts, rules, and principles structured in the unconscious mind were discoverable.  It also meant that the “social sciences" could be transformed from an Art into a Science.  It meant there actually existed a criterion by which all cultural operating systems could be checked.

 

Now one who recognized the need for such a culture-free criterion was theologian Cornelius Van Til who wrote: “In the midst of multitudes of perspectives, there must be a criterion by which these opinions can be judged.”  Pike proposed that the criterion was etic data, data which has been structured in the unconscious mind.

 

Now if such fixed, unchanging data did not exist, then the idea that anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, and missiology could be viewed as a science would be absurd.  To do science, one needs etic data aka constants.   

 

Interestingly, agreeing with Pike that the starting point for analyzing any system was etic data was materialist Marvin Harris.  Like Pike, Harris’ goal in life was to transform the social sciences, especially anthropology, into a hard science.  But to accomplish that goal, he needed etic data aka fixed standards.

 

While he believed that etic data actually existed, as a committed materialist he ruled out the possibility that such data could have been structured in the unconscious mind. Instead such  data was to be found in "the biological and psychological constants of  human  nature."   For Harris, "Empirical science is the foundation of the cultural materialists way of knowing."    

 

And for anthropology to be transformed into real science, it meant one needed to find the constants aka “etic data” in the material environment.  And the procedure for doing this has been laid out by Harris in his book,  Cultural Materialism, the Struggle for a Science of Culture.  

 

Harris' starting point was empiricism, that is, the belief that nothing can be more important than what appears to our five senses and that which could be measured and quantified.   His goal was to uncover the "biological and psychological constants" which compelled one to think what he called "appropriate thoughts."  

 

For Harris, "appropriate thoughts" were created and shaped by one's material environment which he called "infrastructure." And each environment created its own set of "appropriate thoughts.”   In other words, Harris conceived of truth or “appropriate thoughts”  as being a social construct.  All meanings belonged to the people. Each society created its own narrative.  

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According to Harris, “The strategic importance of the infrastructure rests upon the fact that human being can never change these laws.”  And for Pike, the strategic importance of laws "written on the heart" rests upon the fact that they do not belong to the people.   They belong to God.

 

Whereas Pike insists that thoughts, ideas, and concepts are manifested in behavior, both verbal and non-verbal, Harris insists that “behavior determines thoughts.”

 

While Harris postulates that “appropriate thoughts will occur, not once, but again and again when infrastructural conditions are ripe,” this, I discovered, was not what happen to the Chácobo. The kind of “appropriate thoughts”  infrastructural pressures produces included: 

1. The idea that the nuclear family should be subordinate to the wishes of the Chácobo household-of-five.

2.  The idea that all married men in the village should live together in a men’s house along with their unmarried sons. 

3. The idea that the dominate dyad of the nuclear family should be that of the mother-daughter dyad rather than husband-wife. 

4.  The idea that the purpose of marriage szx to obtain a food provider for the household-of-five. 

5. The idea that no bride should “leave father and mother” after being married but should remain at home functioning in the status position of “mother’s helper.”

6. The idea that parallel cousins are not “cousins” but siblings.  The power to attach meanings to universal concepts like family, marriage, husband, wife, brothers, sisters, and sons and daughters “belongs to the people.”

7. Any thought that the nuclear family should be the basic building stone of a positive society society must be suppress.

 

Then one day I discovered there existed Chácobo sages of another era who had classified the above thoughts as being “inappropriate.” (See:            ).   Their classifications of such thoughts as being “inappropriate” convinced me that there existed, structured in the subconscious, Universal Ideas, Values, and Principles which could be triggered and brought to consciousness.

 

If such Principles had not been structured in the subconscious, it would have been impossible for these sages to classify the above thoughts as being “inappropriate.”  

 

Finally, for Harris, "Etic operations have as their hallmark the elevation  of observers to the status of ultimate judges of the categories and concepts used in descriptions and analysis.”  For Harris, evolutionary forces created beings who think they have been positioned above Nature and are the "ultimate judges" of what constitutes a category.  To think otherwise would be to dishonor Almighty Nature.

 

For Harris, “such a belief [ a belief in the existence of mental universals] represents a form of intellectualism infantilism that dishonors our species-given powers of thoughts.”  It is this “species-given powers of thought”  that enabled man to invent the categories.  It represents a belief in magic, the belief that inert matter can create a thinking person. 

 

Since man, according to the materialist, was not endowed by his Creator with an Interpretative System which positioned man outside of Nature in the sphere of Language, Culture, Freedom, and Intentional behavior, in the words of German theologian Johann Hoffman (1375-1451),  Harris was guilty of "permitting the material things of which the world is created to form its standards."  

 

Now to counteract the dominance of "mechanistic science as the explanatory source of all social situation and events,"  Pike wrote: TALK, THOUGHT, and THING, the emic road to conscious knowledge.

 

 Pike's goal was to present to secular academia a non-mechanistic explanation as to the nature of human existence. For Pike, the linguist, the theoretical question was: Does there exist in the unconscious mind a priori universal forms or innate concepts to which are attached Divine meanings?  He provided us the  answer when he wrote: “A person may distort innate positive universals into negative particular actions.”  

  

Convictions:

1. Universal Categories are not invented; they are innate and not learned.

2. The task of science is to uncover the innate Universal Categories that are “woven into the very fabric of our creation." 

3. According to the cultural materialist, all ideas existing in our heads are created and shaped by "infrastructural pressures," which the apostle Paul called, "the material elements of the world" (Col. 2:8).  Whatever ideas are created by “infrastructural pressures,” such ideas will exist as misrepresentations of the Universal.  They will produce chaos and disorder.

4. Appropriate thoughts  in the mind are those which "accord with Christ" (Co. 2:8).

5. Etic data reflects the mind of the Creator, not the perspective of the observer-analyst.