Anthropology and Archaeology
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of Taylor amp Francis This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library, 2002. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission...
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Pitt Rivers Museum for permission to reproduce the cover photograph and Figure 2.1 B2219Q . I am grateful to University of Nebraska Press for permission to reproduce Figure 3.1 J. Green, ed., 1979, Zuni Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing Map 1 . I am grateful to the American Museum of Natural History for permission to reproduced Figure 3.2 F. Boas, 1907, 'Second report on the Esquimo of Baffin Land and Hudson's Bay', Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural...
Doubts about anthropological fieldwork
As you will remember, the main use Malinowski made of fieldwork was as a source of objective and replicable facts which could provide a solid and distinctive empirical basis for anthropology, so that a set of facts created by one fieldworker could be replicated by another in the same field situation with only minor discrepancies. As Stocking 1992 51 says, Malinowski's aim was to show that ethnographic information was 'objectively acquired knowledge' and not 'subjectively formed notions'. This...
Anthropological archaeology and archaeological anthropology
'Stone Age tribe flees bushfires in Brazil' was a headline carried by a number of British newspapers in March 1998. During this month bushfires raged through the savannah and rainforest of Roriama Province of northwest Brazil, due to a drought said to be caused by El Ni o. What does the newspapers' use of the term 'Stone Age' mean Stone Age evokes echoes of the land that time forgot portions of the globe and groups of people by-passed by the major currents of history the survival of the past in...
Instituting archaeology
Archaeology has woven a more tangled web on both sides of the Atlantic so that it is more difficult to present a neat history of the discipline and also to see a small number of figures as foundational. An inability to identify mythical founders of archaeology undoubtedly leads to a more realistic perspective, but also provides an insight into the discipline which is useful in itself. British archaeology owes its genesis to a number of different figures. Field methods were pioneered by Pitt...
Gender in anthropology
Gender is a perfect area to study transformations, if gender itself is approached from particular points of view. The view I shall develop here is that of gender as transformation, one of the most important of a series of transformations brought about by the sets of relations composing cultural life. Feminist thought is the main arena within which gender has been tackled, but it is not the only one. So-called masculinist theory its name echoing feminism has tried to come to terms with the...
Creative consumption
Consumption is hard to define in its anthropological usage, the more so because the use of the term has drifted away from its common-sense connotations. Consumption sounds rather final, as if things are used and used up at the same time, as food is in the act of eating or fuel in a car. Using up material things in social acts is part of what people mean by consumption, but it can also refer to acquisition through gift exchange or commercial activity, or to acts with long-lasting consequences,...
A tale of two collections part
People attempt to make sense of the world through cosmologies abstract schemes which specify the ideal order of the universe, the position of things and people within the universe and the correct set of moral relationships and actions which should pertain between people and things. Cosmologies are not just abstract intellectual entities, but have practical consequences through informing peoples' actions and helping them to make sense of changing circumstances. One means of making sense of the...
Landscape material culture and history
This chapter explores the material dimension of life, which is obviously the area where archaeology and anthropology meet most closely. A consideration of topics such as landscape and material culture crosses the boundary between the two disciplines so regularly as to blur any real distinction them and the will to break down boundaries is now quite pronounced, especially in Britain. Any notion of material anthropology needs a solid consideration of the material itself. For purely heuristic...
Good practice
The roots of modern thought about practice can be traced at least back to Mauss mentioned in chaps 4 and 5 . Mauss's thought and that which has followed reversed the links between biology and culture, where the former was seen as cause and the latter as effect. For instance, L vi-Strauss notes 1987 in relation to Mauss's work, that racial theories saw people as products of their bodies, but in fact the body can be seen to be produced through different social techniques. This was Mauss's...
Landscape
The study of landscape is appealing partly because it crosses the boundaries between geography, art history, anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines. The transgressive nature of the topic allows a variety of approaches and subject matters to be considered under the topic of landscape, which make it both a rich and an indefinable field. Common ground can be found, however, and at the most basic level this is seen in a shift in perspectives about landscape from abstract and objective...
fields
Figure 7.2 Axes of spatial orientation among the Marakwet after Moore 1996a Figure circular and the internal layout is invariant, with beds, food preparation and storage facilities always in the same places. This is because the bed is always put behind the door, as the most private spot in the house, and everything else is arranged with respect to the bed. In earlier times most compounds would have had two houses, one for a man and the other for his wife Figure 7.3 these days the two dwellings...
Ritualised actions
Many competing definitions of ritual have been offered over the years. For Durkheim, ritual was the means by which collective beliefs were generated and affirmed and the practice of ritual saw the meeting of collective representations and individual experience Durkheim 1965 . Ritual was vital to the group's sense of itself and to bind the individual to the group. Tambiah 1976 saw the timeless and traditional nature of ritual being always opposed to the historical and changing nature of everyday...
Instituting anthropology
For many years there was myth about the origins of anthropology which was both pervasive and persuasive and it centred round the person of Malinowski. Malinowski had, according to this origin story, which was partly of his own telling, invented the methodologies and procedures of fieldwork which allowed anthropologists access to large, detailed and importantly verifiable bodies of information about non-European peoples. Accounts of kinship, ritual, trade and sexual activities could form the...
The years of change Haddon and Rivers
Tylor's views arose at the apogee of Victorian self-confidence but even by the 1890s were being nuanced by the views of others with different experiences. One of these was Haddon who, influenced by his early career as a biologist, assumed a Darwinian perspective. But his work in one relatively small region, that of the Torres Strait, meant that he became interested in localised evolution as a complement to global trends and in an attempt to define local artistic provinces in the borderland...
The evolutionists Morgan and Tylor
Let us turn first to evolutionist views, as these came first historically. These, though diverse, had core notions in common. First, and maybe the most important, of these was the comparative method. In the eighteenth century Turgot had held that the present state of the world contains all the past stages of humanity and the key to history lay in the systematic comparison and ordering of societies in the present. In the nineteenth century we have only to look at the full title of Lubbock's...
History
As we have seen before, anthropology has had a complex and fluctuating relationship with history. For much of this century, in Britain at least, any close relationship was made difficult through the stress on the synchronic within structural-functionalism. A major change was heralded by Evans-Pritchard's 1950 break with Radcliffe-Brown, although this article led to no flood of publications on historical change and it is not until the last twenty years that the fiction of the 'ethnographic...
Boas relativism and culture history
Attempts to rewrite the history of anthropology were even more marked in the United States, through Boas' 1858-1942 attempts to define himself as the founding culture hero of the discipline. Many people have noted Boas' systematic disregard for earlier anthropology in the United States, even though he had close contacts in his early years with the Bureau of American Ethnology, and especially with Putnam who helped establish him in American anthropology Mark 1980 173 . Boas was crucial in...
Preface
One possible way to write this book was as a volume entitled 'Anthropology for Archaeologists'. A book with this title already exists Orme 1981 , as do others with similar aims Hodder 1982 . As well as not wanting to cover old ground, I soon became convinced that to explain anthropology to archaeologists was not possible. Books have been written on statistics for archaeologists, for instance, as these two disciplines have had largely separate histories and only the slightest of mutual...
Dwelling
A stress on dwelling is an antidote to what Bourdieu calls the outsider's perspective in anthropology. Dwelling emphasises the full sensuous experience of living in the world, a rounded appreciation of which is lost from most analytical perspectives. There is much overlap between theories of practice and a dwelling perspective and this derives in part from their joint phenomenological heritage see Gosden 1994 . An emphasis on wholeness has led to attempts to overcome divisions into mind and...
EASTERN ntn HIGHLANDS
Figure 5.7 MapofPapuaNew Guinea Highlands fromFeil 1987 The Evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea Societies Figure 2 pig herds. This fact has also been vital to exchange systems, as those with the most pigs could always dominate others in regional exchange systems. The coming of the sweet potato changed this differential ability to support exchange and those who had been previously disadvantaged could manage higher levels of production once they could grow sweet potato on their poorer soils or...
Marxism
The figures of Marx and Engels have been absent from this story until now, which may seem surprising given their general influence on modern thought. However, it is amazing how little academic influence they had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the west in areas like Russia, influence was crucial and early . This general lack of influence also makes more striking the Marxist thought of Gordon Childe, the only major figure in either discipline in the English-speaking world...
Structuralist and symbolic anthropologies
In the middle of the century, starting in France, but moving into the Englishspeaking world in the 1950s and 1960s, came a stress on meaning which promoted both a revolution in anthropology, partly through a return to older forms of thought, especially those of Boas and Durkheim. L vi-Strauss's structuralism was an eclectic mix, but with a considerable coherence to it. We have encountered some of these elements before others are new. From Durkheim L vi-Strauss took an interest in how societies...
Anthropological archaeology
'Archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing', is a statement with which many archaeologists would strongly agree. As a statement of disciplinary identity, it is odd, contradictory and not at all straightforward. It seems somewhat unusual to define one discipline in terms of another. As far as I know, no one has ever said anthropology is archaeology or it is nothing. Not to define archaeology in its own terms appears intellectually lazy, bad academic politics and lacking in disciplinary...
Anthropological archaeology in North America
It was Willey and Phillips 1958 2 who wrote that 'American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.' It is worth noting that they limited the statement to America and it would not have been true in any sense to say the same of British archaeology at the time. This statement had been true since the time of Boas at the end of previous century, who emphasised the combination of social anthropology and archaeology needed to uncover the culture history of local areas see chap. 5 . However,...
My approach to the special relationship
To start from a negative point of view I find specific analogies between present and past dubious, whether this is at the level of the individual artefact, economic formations or the shape of society as a whole. The old synthesis of evolution, whether that of the nineteenth century or the mid-twentieth is inherently progressivist and laden with ethnographic assumptions. I feel that ethnoarchaeology is immoral, in that we have no justification for using the present of one society simply to...
Revisionist histories
Of the many criticisms that could be raised against the New Archaeology's generalising use of anthropology on both sides of the Atlantic, I would like to concentrate on the lack of interest in two sets of history that of colonialism and the local histories of the areas from which anthropological exemplars were drawn. To take the impact of colonialism first. Thought on hunter-gatherers has changed continuously over the last 150 years, one of the most famous changes being occasioned by the 1966...
Neoevolution Marxism and structuralism
The history of anthropology has been one of varying closeness to historical approaches. Each time anthropology developed an interest in history it was also brought into proximity with archaeology. The evolutionary interests of the nineteenth century made little real distinction between archaeology and anthropology in their covering rubric of ethnology. The same was true of Boasian culture history, although it employed a very different view of the nature of the historical process, emphasising...
Functionalism Durkheim Malinowski and RadcliffeBrown
It is often felt that functionalism, which later became hyphenated to structural-functionalism, was developed mainly in reaction to evolutionism. But when Malinowski was developing his own point of view at the London School of Economics the major rival school was that of Smith and Perry at University College London. Malinowski described his proposed treatment of 'Smith, Perry amp Co. like a basketfull of rotten eggs with the greatest care and consideration, not to say respect' quoted in...
Neoevolutionism
In the United States neo-evolutionary ideas had a considerable impact on anthropology from the 1940s onwards and on archaeology from the late 1950s. In Britain, the influence on archaeology was contemporary with the US, but neo-evolutionary ideas never had much impact on British anthropology. Two figures are crucial in the early history of neo-evolutionism Leslie White and Julian Steward and although there were many arguments between proponents of various forms of evolutionism, certain...
Styles of life
Northeast Arnhem Land is criss-crossed with Dreaming tracks, which are the routes taken by ancestral beings in the creation of the country. Inland from Trial Bay Figure 7.4 is a place by the river called Wurlwurlwuy. The river had been created by a shark rushing inland after it had been speared by an ancestral harpoon. The shark became caught in a fish trap at Wurlwurlwuy, but escaped by breaking the trap apart and in the process the shark became transformed into various features of the...
Anthropological archaeology in Britain
Rather the opposite is the case in Britain. Since the demise of the evolutionary synthesis in the late nineteenth century chaps 2 and 3 there has been little contact between prehistoric archaeology and anthropology. In the recent period David Clarke in Analytical Archaeology asserted that archaeology, is archaeology, is archaeology Clarke 1968 13 . Shennan 1989 833 sees this work as an attempt to combine the end of the Childean culture tradition and a new cultural archaeology, which was looking...
The hyperdiffusionists
Before leaving the subj ect of diffusionism we must once again cross the Atlantic and consider the most extreme form of the idea as developed byGrafton Elliott Smith and Perry in London. It is ironical that the last time that archaeology, physical anthropology and social anthropology were brought together in Britain was in the service of the thoroughly discredited idea of hyper-diffusionism. For Tylor the notion of independent invention was crucial to his evolutionary theory, as it demonstrated...