In his classic Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), the British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard makes a claim that may have been startling to his audience at the time but that will seem common-sensical now. He is describing the work of a generation of thinkers who preceded him, major figures in anthropology, psychology, and sociology responsible for early and influential social-scientific ideas about the religious systems of tribal peoples. To understand these thinkers, Evans-Pritchard says, one must “enter into their way of looking at things, a way of their class, sex, and period.” What’s more, one needs some sense of their religious training and inclination: “Tylor had been brought up a Quaker, Frazer a Presbyterian, Marett in the Church of England, Malinowski a Catholic, while Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, and Freud had a Jewish background; but with one or two exceptions, whatever the background may have been, the persons whose writings have been most influential have been at the time they wrote agnostics or atheists.”
To emphasize such personal contingencies in this way is to suggest that the study of religion is a special kind of science, one in which the values and biography of the scientist have a more than usual importance. They might be distorting, leading thinkers to overemphasize, for instance, specious continuities between primitive sacrifice and the story of Christ. Or they might be enabling. Of Émile Durkheim’s definition of religion — “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things … which unite, into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them” — Evans-Pritchard says “Durkheim’s Hebraic background comes out strongly, it seems to me, though not inappropriately.”
As our Tom Bartlett reports, perennial questions about the relationship of a researcher’s identity to the subject of research have exploded into view again in the field of psychology, riven at the moment by an ugly dispute over diversity and racism between the now-former editor of a major journal and a Stanford faculty member. Here’s the story, in brief: In 2020, the Stanford psychologist Steven O. Roberts published, as lead author, an article in Perspectives on Psychological Science called “Racial Inequality in Psychological Research: Trends of the Past and Recommendations for the Future.” The article seeks to give a quantitative picture of the lack of racial diversity among editors, authors, and research subjects across several decades of work “in top-tier cognitive, developmental, and social psychology journals"; to speculate about the stakes of diversity for knowledge production, especially knowledge production about the psychology of race; and to offer prescriptions for diversifying the field, including describing and justifying the demographic composition of samples and, most controversially, requiring “positionality statements” from authors, which would render “transparent how the identities of the authors relate to the research topic.”
Things went wrong when Klaus Fiedler, who became editor of Perspectives of Psychological Science in 2021, attempted to organize a series of responses to Roberts’s article, including highly critical pieces by Bernhard Hommel and Lee Jussim. Hommel argued that for a great deal of fundamental research into cognitive and psychological mechanisms, the race of participants and researchers is simply irrelevant. And both authors accused Roberts and his co-authors of sneaking what Hommel called “political-activist arguments” into science. As Bartlett summarizes, “Jussim employs an analogy, drawn from a quote in Fiddler on the Roof, about a horse and a mule. He writes that mixing science and ideology is like selling someone a mule when what you promised was a horse. Because Roberts’s paper is both scientific and ideological, according to Jussim, it is a rhetorical hybrid — i.e., a mule.”
