Introduction: Knowledge in a Divided World

The topic of this chapter is to raise, yet again, the question of insider and outsider knowledge that has occupied much of the conventional debate in sociology and anthropology about understanding other cultures. Quite simply it concerns the issue as to whether people who are practising members of a religious community (or indeed any community) are more reliable witnesses to the nature of that religion or its communal culture than social scientists who are not members. Insiders are more likely to be knowledgeable about that community and very likely to be more sympathetic witnesses than outsiders. On the other hand, it is reasonable to believe that outsiders might be more objective and conceivably notice aspects of a religion or culture that are ignored or neglected by insiders. This debate also takes us into the status of science itself. In this chapter I start therefore with some elementary ideas about inside and outside witness. In Chapter 4, I raise some postmodern and pragmatist objections to conventional notions of science and objectivity as a neutral mirror held up to the world. In Chapter 8, I explore the far more complex issue of ‘positionality’ in contemporary humanities and social science. In Chapter 9, I attempt to bring together some final considerations on a debate that has raged in sociology since its foundation as a separate and distinctive discipline in the social sciences. The debate ultimately centres on the problem of objective knowledge and how that might be secured, for example by outside independent inquiry or by inside familiarity. At each stage of this discussion, the idea of understanding gains in increasing breadth and complexity. In this chapter, I raise issues that have emerged primarily in sociology. However, in many respects, anthropology has stood at the centre of these issues concerning the position of ethnographers in their engagement with aboriginal communities.

Let me begin to develop this chapter with a lengthy discussion of a famous article by Robert Merton (1972), ‘Insiders and outsiders: a chapter in the sociology of knowledge’. Merton observed that in societies, where there is extensive social conflict and fragmentation of the social structure, these social and political conflicts are often reflected in basic distrust of objective knowledge.