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James Baldwin wrote about "the evidence of things not seen." The historians David William Cohen and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo spoke of "the anthropology of the shadows". 1/
The problem for formal social analysis, whether at the 'hard' quantitative or the 'soft' qualitative/humanistic end, is that the one thing is certain is that many processes that shape our world cannot be studied well or at all. The causes of many events are hidden. 2/
We rarely if ever have transcripts of what the powerful say to one another in their consultations and planning. We know that they do consult and plan, with consequence, but often we will never know exactly what was said or planned. 3/
We know there are criminal conspiracies (of both the powerful and the downtrodden) which are only witnessed and anatomized in the breach--when they fail or are caught. We can't study them directly most of the time, only indirectly through their effects or brief witness. 4/
There have been many military coups since 1945 all around the world. Only a few of them are well known to social science. We don't know usually what causes them, how they're organized, why they succeed or fail. We can only guess. 5/
There is a shadow economy that shapes our world. Drugs are only one small part of it. Money, goods and people flow over and through borders. Justice systems around the world sometimes reveal their workings. Sometimes they partake in them. We don't know most of it. 6/
We don't know what happens in a quotidian way in many communities when no one from outside is there to see. That's what Cohen and Odhiambo talk about with the anthropology of the shadows--the unfolding of important events that are never narrated, ever, except accidentally. 7/
There's so much that is causally important, structurally important, that we can't see but that we can know IS important. There are so many agents whose decisions will never be known to us, and whose importance is only indirectly visible. 8/
It is utter folly for any social scientist to demand the kind of proof that is needed to convict a person of a crime and deprive them of their liberty--"beyond a reasonable doubt"--in order to entertain the possibility that an event or process happened in secret, unseen. 9/
It is also utter folly, of course, to become so convinced of a single causal theory of invisible or unseen action that you regard it as necessarily true. 10/
But if you're a scholar who studies human societies, you have to allow both that there are meaningful events that happen in contradiction to the offical transcript *all the time*, and that unseen structures and processes shape the world that you care about and analyze.
