社會與其結構：再思社會人類學

Society and Its Structure: Rethinking Social Anthropology

研究倫理審查委員會由行政事務與審查事務構成，兩者共同運作，執行研究倫理的抽象概念、審查的規範、以及審查的制度。倫理審查會議是「保護被研究者」與「學術知識進展」的協商場合，也是生產表單、程序、與規範的場合。審查會議藉由提出各種預期可能性，來掌握研究計畫的風險，經由反覆討論而達成對倫理原則和應用的共識，並通過重新導向與安排文件的流程，來確保組織作業的一致性。這些會議的產物（文件）進一步框架了審查如何進行，以及研究倫理審查的範疇。無論做為審查程序的一部份、產生決定的途徑，或是建立倫理審查組織與運作的機制，研究倫理審查都與會議密不可分。本文透過會議以及和會議相關的文件，來看大學人類研究倫理審查委員會的執行過程，了解倫理審查如何將倫理原則轉化為可以執行的程序與規範，而會議與文件的形式又如何框架倫理審查。

This article aims to investigate the reasoning process which has made the study of social structure and the question of social continuity become an old-school research topic with little value and feasibility among social anthropologists. This process began with social anthropologists' various ontological presuppositions, that is, how 'Society' is imagined; whether social life is, in essence, the continuous activities of living individuals or partial demonstrations of an out-of-sight, gigantic entity; how social anthropologists should describe and define such an object, etc.. Their ontological presuppositions have provided a set of answers for fundamental questions like 'what is society?' 'what does society look like?' 'what kind of continuity would be necessary for such society?' and 'what kind of structure would be necessary for such continuity?' In this reasoning process, however, central connotations of some key concepts used by social anthropologists have shifted from one property to another, which I call 'accent shift.' For example, the accent of the concept 'realness' has shifted from 'permanent relations' to 'boundedness'; the accent of the concept 'organicity' has shifted from 'mutual dependence' to 'part-whole relations,' etc.. These accent shifts are hard to discern, but have implicitly changed the contents of ideas, including social realism, organic analogy, etc. Correspondingly, social anthropologists' understanding of social life and its continuity has also been twisted. Consequently, the study of social structure has led to the theoretical dead alley of holism and mechanism. Rather than a literature review of anthropological theories of society, this article is an attempt to depict the routes of reasoning when theorists were conceiving their theories. In my opinion, many problems in social anthropology are nothing but a problem of bifurcation among various routes of reasoning. Social anthropologists might observe the same things from different angles, associate the same things with different kinds of relations, and focus on different points within the same concepts, discourses, and ideas. What really matters here is neither the qualities and quantities of empirical data nor the technical problem of 'truth and its representation,' i.e. some people did their fieldwork or wrote their ethnographies badly while others did not. It is rather a problem of social anthropologists' own modes of thinking, their analytical tools and theoretical models which are applied to organize and rework their empirical data. But it should be recognized that those modes of thinking, analytical tools and theoretical models are not products of induction but gifts from devolution and inspiration. Even solid empirical data will not be able to correct mistakes existing in those modes, tools, and models if theorists have a belief in them and attribute the inconsistencies to the people who collected and used the data. In the end, the problem of modes of thinking has to be solved by means of logic, which makes this job look more like a kind of meta-anthropology, as this job can only be done by social anthropologists themselves.