Precursors of the anthropological tradition
Most anthropologists would agree that anthropology emerged as a distinct branch of scholarship around the middle of the nineteenth century, when public interest in human evolution took hold. Anthropology as an academic discipline began a bit later, with the first appointments of professional anthropologists in universities, museums, and government offices. However, there is no doubt that anthropological ideas came into being much earlier. How much earlier is a matter of disagreement, though not...
Contents
1 Visions of anthropology 1 2 Precursors of the anthropological tradition 15 3 Changing perspectives on evolution 27 4 Diffusionist and culture-area theories 47 5 Functionalism and structural-functionalism 61 6 Action-centred, processual, and Marxist perspectives 80 7 From relativism to cognitive science 99 8 Structuralism, from linguistics to anthropology 120 9 Poststructuralists, feminists, and other mavericks 139 10 Interpretive and postmodernist approaches 158 Appendix 1 Dates of birth and...
Visions of the history of anthropology
A. sequence OF events OR new ideas e.g., Stocking 1987 1996a Kuk-lick 1991 B. succession of time frames, either stages of development or Kuhnian paradigms, each of which is best analysed internally e.g., Hammond-Tooke 1997 and to some extent Stocking 1996a C. system of ideas, which changes through time and which should be analysed dynamically e.g., Kuper 1988 and to some extent Harris 1968 Malefijt 1976 D. set of parallel national traditions e.g., Lowie 1937 and to some extent Hammond-Tooke...
The structuralfunctionalism of RadcliffeBrown
Alfred Reginald Brown was born in Birmingham in 1881. Following his older brother's lead, he adopted the style A. Radcliffe Brown adding their mother's maiden name around 1920, and became A. R. Radcliffe-Brown by deed poll in 1926. He was known to his friends as Rex, R-B, or in his university days, Anarchy Brown, because of his political inclinations. In fact, he knew the anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin, whose vision of society as a self-regulating system, functioning by mutual aid in the...
Concluding summary
Theory in social and cultural anthropology is dependent on what questions anthropologists ask. The organizational structure of the discipline, and the relation of theory to ethnographic findings are integral to these questions. Broadly, theories may be classified as diachronic, synchronic, or interactive, in focus. Paradigms in the physical and natural sciences generally have clear-cut, agreed goals. Anthropological paradigms are not as easy to pin down. We may characterize much of the history...
Concluding summary Xio
Mavericks, poststructuralists, and feminists possess a diversity of perspectives. Yet these perspectives have in common both roots in structuralist thinking and challenges to mainstream structuralist anthropology, especially in attempts to integrate structure with action and account for relations of power. Functionalism and structuralism had represented both safe perspectives and safe periods for anthropology, indeed in the latter case a period in which anthropology served as a major source for...
Concluding summary 1
It is impossible to define an exact moment when anthropology begins, but anthropological ideas emerged long before the establishment of the discipline. Crucial to the understanding of what was to come were notions of natural law and the social contract, as formulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though these ideas have long since been jettisoned by most social scientists, they mark a baseline for debate about the nature of society. Eighteenth-century anthropological concerns...
Conclusions
This book has dealt with the 'content' of anthropological theory. Yet anthropological theory is not a vessel to be emptied of old ideas and filled with new ones, or stuffed with more virulent paradigms to strangle the weak ones. Anthropological theory undoubtedly has 'form' as well as content, and in this final chapter we shall focus initially on the question of what form this might be, then return to the issue of the relation between form and content, first with some reflections on the future...
Anthropology and ethnology
The words 'anthropology' and 'ethnology' have had different meanings through the years. They have also had different meanings in different countries. The word 'anthropology' is ultimately from the Greek anthropos, 'human', plus logos, 'discourse' or 'science' . Its first usage to define a scientific discipline is probably around the early sixteenth century in its Latin form anthropologium . Central European writers then employed it as a term to cover anatomy and physiology, part of what much...
Changing perspectives on evolution
By the 1860s the stage was set for evolutionist anthropology to come into its own within what was then, in Britain as on the Continent, usually called ethnology. It had already done so in archaeology, especially in Denmark. There the three-age theory Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age had been systematically propagated from around 1836 by Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, Sven Nilsson, and others see, e.g., Trigger 1989 73-86 . Yet what became British anthropology grew not so much from this source,...
Preface
This book began life as a set of lecture notes for a course in anthropological theory, but it has evolved into something very different. In struggling through several drafts, I have toyed with arguments for regarding anthropological theory in terms of the history of ideas, the development of national traditions and schools of thought, and the impact of individuals and the new perspectives they have introduced to the discipline. I have ended up with what I believe is a unique but eclectic...
Concluding summary Vjw
Interpretivism and postmodernism fit into anthropology in a very straightforward way, as aspects of a time-honoured set of analogies between language and culture. An understanding of that relationship, and its historical transformation, lies at the root of new developments in anthropology and in other social sciences. Anthropological theory has paralleled linguistic theory in uncanny ways through its history. This is not simply fortuitous. Rather it has been recognized and utilized by...
Further thoughts on histories of anthropology
Can there ever be a true history of a discipline Or, the converse, is all history 'Whig history' I think there are good grounds for favouring the latter, inherently relativistic, view, or at least for admitting that whenever anthropologists put pen to paper they will come out with a somewhat Whiggish version of events. 'Whig history' is a phrase coined by Sir Herbert Butterfield around 1931, when he said that historians have all too often seen history as a conflict between progressives and...
Concluding summary Bov
I do not accept that old anthropological theories die with their proponents. Rather, I hold that in general they are either incorporated into new theoretical trends, or they return in some later generation in a different guise. The foundations of our discipline were there in the Enlightenment, especially in the notion of the social contract the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century basis of all social science , but the discipline itself emerged in the nineteenth century. The arguments of early...
Tables
1.1 Diachronic, synchronic, and interactive perspectives 9 1.2 Perspectives on society and on culture 11 3.1 Evolution Maine, Morgan, and others versus revolution Rousseau, Freud, Knight, and others. 44 5.1 Malinowski's seven basic needs and their cultural responses 69 7.1 Approximate correspondences between words for 'tree', 'woods', and 'forest' in Danish, German, and French 113 7.2 Two componential analyses of English consanguineal kin 8.1 English voiced and unvoiced stops 124 8.2...
Concluding summary Vql
Boas founded a new anthropology based broadly on relativist principles, or at least on principles emphasizing culture difference and the moral worth of different understandings of the world. Like the functionalists he challenged the old order, but the anthropology which emerged in Boasian America was for a time profoundly different from that of Malinowskian, Radcliffe-Brownian Britain. The strongest proponents of relativism were, in their different ways, those of the 'culture and personality...
Culturearea and regional approaches
Each and every anthropologist specializes in the study of some culture area - that where he or she does fieldwork. Yet the importance of the culture area varies according to the theoretical interest of the ethnographer. Broadly, it is useful to distinguish two kinds of culture-area approach. The first is that of American anthropology as it developed from German-Austrian diffusionism. The other, a much more diffuse approach, and in no sense a single school ofthought or national tradition, is...
Primitive thought
Do peoples who live in different cultures think differently If so, are some ways of thinking more primitive than others Can we say that some cultures are more primitive than others The notion of'primitive thought' has existed at least since the late nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century it has acquired new meaning. Among twentieth-century questions are if 'primitive thought' exists, then does it exist only among 'primitive peoples', or is it found universally, perhaps deep within all...
Concluding summary Ttf
Diffusionism at the end of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, offered anthropologists one of many points of departure from the pervasive dominance of evolutionism. The extreme ideas of the British school, with its emphasis on Ancient Egypt as the source of high culture the world over, proved of little merit. The more moderate notions of the German-Austrian school filtered into American anthropology and emerged transformed as 'the culture-area approach'. Ultimately, a number of...
Bastian
Diffusionism originated in the eighteenth-century philological tradition which posited historical connections between all the languages of the Indo-European language family. The philological tradition diffusionism before the diffusionists The breakthrough came in 1787, when Sir William Jones, an English Orientalist and barrister serving as a judge in India, discovered similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. In the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussian diplomat and...
Evolutionist precursors and the organic analogy
Radcliffe-Brown recalled more than once that anthropology has two points of origin. He dated one to 'around 1870', the heyday of evolutionist thinking. The other he dated to Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws published in French in 1748 . This sociological tradition respected the idea that society is systematically structured, and that its structures are the proper study of the disciplines we now call the social sciences. It also, at least from Comte onwards, held to the view that its object of...
Dates of birth and death of individuals mentioned in the text
Albert, Prince Franz Albrecht, Prinz von Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha , 1819-61 Althusser, Louis, 1918-90 Ardener, Edwin, 1927-87 Aristotle, 384-322 BC Asad, Talal, 1927-Atran, Scott, 1952- Avebury, Lord, see Lubbock, Sir John, Bt. Bachofen, J. J., 1815-77 Bailey, F. G., 1924-Barnes, J. A., 1918-Barth, Fredrik, 1928-Bastian, Adolph, 1826-1905 Bateson, Gregory, 1904-80 Bateson, William, 1861-1926 Benedict, Ruth Fulton, 1887-1948 Bentham, Jeremy, 1748-1832 Binford, Lewis R., 1930-Boas, Franz, 1858-1942...
Anthropological paradigms
It is commonplace in many academic fields to distinguish between a 'theory' and a 'theoretical perspective'. By a theoretical perspective, we usually mean a grand theory, what is sometimes called a theoretical framework or a broad way of looking at the world. In anthropology we sometimes call such a thing a cosmology if it is attributed to a 'traditional' culture, or a paradigm if it is attributed to Western scientists. The theoretical perspective, cosmology, or paradigm defines the major...
Concepts of changing times
The postmodernist challenge in anthropology has yielded new concepts and areas of new research associated with them. Among the most important are reflexivity and orientalism. Let us consider these with regard to the related concepts of reflexivism which entails a theoretical emphasis on reflexivity , occidentalism, and globalization. All anthropologists do comparison of one kind or another. Those who work far from home might compare more to classic anthropological cases like Nuer or Trobriand...
Orientalism occidentalism and globalization
An important component of postmodern anthropology is the interest in power, derived from Foucault among others see chapter 9 . A related concern has been the identification of power as a manifestation of colonial and postcolonial discourses through 'orientalism'. The concept was in troduced by Edward Said, a Palestinian literary critic long resident in the United States. In Orientalism 1978 and later works, Said attacks the West for creating a notion of the East, the Orient, in order to...
Interpretive and postmodernist approaches
After Radcliffe-Brown's death in 1955, British anthropology went in four different directions. Some in the next generation simply continued Rad-cliffe-Brown's line of enquiry notably Fortes and to some extent Goody . Others, such as Firth, came to emphasize individual action over social structure - an approach drawn partly from Malinowski's early fieldwork-based version of functionalism chapter 5 . This line of thought developed into theories such as processualism and transactionalism chapter 6...
Diffusionism proper
Diffusionism came to prominence in the work of German and Austrian geographer-anthropologists in the late nineteenth century. As we shall see, it then fell into obscurity and absurdity albeit interesting absurdity in Britain, in the hands of two early twentieth-century Egyptologists. The first great diffusionist was Friedrich Ratzel. He trained as a zoologist, but soon turned to geography and saw his theory in terms of a discipline which came to be called 'anthropogeography' Anthropogeographie...
The four fields approach
In North America, things are much simpler than in Europe. In the United States and Canada, 'anthropology' is generally understood to include four fields or subdisciplines 3 anthropological linguistics, The main concern of this book is with cultural anthropology, but let us take each of these branches of North American anthropology in turn. 1 Biological anthropology is the study of human biology, especially as it relates to a broadly conceived 'anthropology' - the science of humankind. Sometimes...
Theory and ethnography
In social or cultural anthropology, a distinction is often made between 'ethnography' and 'theory'. Ethnography is literally the practice of writing about peoples. Often it is taken to mean our way of making sense of other peoples' modes of thought, since anthropologists usually study cultures other than their own. Theory is also, in part anyway, our way of making sense of our own, anthropological mode of thought. However, theory and ethnography inevitably merge into one. It is impossible to...
Functionalism and structuralfunctionalism
The terms 'functionalist' and 'structural-functionalist' and their corresponding 'isms' are now quite stable in their meanings. However, this was not always the case. Before looking at the theories, a brief tour of the changing nuances of the terms is in order. 'Functionalism' is a broad term. In its widest sense, it includes both functionalism narrowly defined and structural-functionalism. I use it mainly in the narrower sense, that is, to refer to ideas associated with Bronislaw Malinowski...
Durkheimian sociology
Perhaps the most important source for structural-functionalist ideas is the sociology of Emile Durkheim. After an undistinguished student career and a spell of philosophy teaching, Durkheim gained a university post the first in the social sciences in France at Bordeaux in 1887. He moved to the Sorbonne in 1902 and taught there until his death in 1917. He gathered around him a devoted group of philosophers, economists, historians, and jurists, who shared his vision of an integrated science of...
EvansPritchards interpretive approach
E. E. Evans-Pritchard studied under C. G. Seligman and Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. He made six major field expeditions to the Sudan and British East Africa, notably with the Zande Azande , Nuer, Anuak, Shilluk, and Luo. His accounts of Zande witchcraft Evans-Pritchard 1937 and Nuer politics and kinship 1940 1951a served both to epitomize the British anthropology of their time and to inspire succeeding generations - albeit more on a theoretical than an ethnographic...
Culture and personality
Culture was the abiding abstract interest of American anthropology from Boas to Geertz with the latter steering clear of static abstraction in favour of a more dynamic approach . This does not mean that there has always been uniformity about what 'culture' is. In a famous overview, A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn 1952 cite over a hundred definitions by anthropologists, philosophers, literary critics, and others. They divide the anthropological definitions into six groups descriptive based on...
Actioncentred processual and Marxist perspectives
From the 1950s onwards there were a number of attempts to move anthropology away from the formal, society-centred paradigms, especially structural-functionalism, towards more individual and action-centred ones. Among these are the transactionalism of Fredrik Barth, various interrelated approaches of the 'Manchester School', and 'processual' offshoots of structuralism, including much of the work of Edmund Leach see chapters 8 and 9 . Earlier ideas on social and cultural processes include the...
Sociological and anthropological thought
Standing somewhat apart from the romantic concerns with feral children, Orang Outangs, and noble savages was the sociological tradition embodied by Montesquieu, Saint-Simon, and Comte. Paralleling this, successors to the Scottish Enlightenment argued vehemently over the biological relationships between the 'races'. Both of these developments were to leave their mark in nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology. The baron de Montesquieu's Persian Letters 1964 1721 chronicle the adventures...
Biological and anthropological traditions
Encyclopedists of the Middle Ages classified the universe from high to low - God to angels to man man to apes, and apes to worms animals to plants. They believed the world was ordered, and they thought they could deduce its order according to principles embodied in the 'Great Chain of Being' which united all living things. The term was in use well into the eighteenth century, and arguably the modern theory of evolution is an elaboration of this notion see Lovejoy 1936 . However, there are two...
Diffusionist and culturearea theories
Diffusionism stresses the transmission of things material or otherwise from one culture to another, one people to another, or one place to another. An implicit presupposition of extreme diffusionism is that humankind is uninventive things are invented only once, and then are transmitted from people to people, sometimes across the globe. This can be effected either by direct transmission between stable populations or through migrations by culture-rich peoples. In contrast, classical evolutionism...
Towards cognitive science
After Whorf's untimely death in 1941, within anthropology there was a lull in interest in the topics he studied. When interest in the linguistic aspects of culture re-emerged in the 1950s, the theoretical emphasis in linguistics had changed from the descriptive pioneered by Boas and Table 7.1. Approximate correspondences between words for 'tree', 'woods', and 'forest' in Danish, German, and French woods, woodland, forest Wald - Sapir to the structural. Ideas drawn from structural linguistics...
Geertzs interpretivism
While Evans-Pritchard showed the way towards interpretivism, it is nevertheless a little harder to justify the appellation 'ism' to his approach than it is to that of Clifford Geertz. Evans-Pritchard's anthropology was, as much as anything, a reaction against the structural-functionalist enterprise, whereas Geertz's marks a positive move towards an understanding of the minutiae of culture as an end in itself. Geertz, now based at Princeton, was trained at Harvard and has taught at Berkeley and...
Visions of anthropology
Anthropology is a subject in which theory is of great importance. It is also a subject in which theory is closely bound up with practice. In this chapter, we shall explore the general nature of anthropological enquiry. Of special concern are the way the discipline is defined in different national traditions, the relation between theory and ethnography, the distinction between synchronic and diachronic approaches, and how anthropologists and historians have seen the history of the discipline....
NeoDarwinism
Neo-Darwinism is a broad set of perspectives comprising two basic and very different schools of thought sociobiology and what might be called 'revolutionist' as opposed to narrowly evolutionist thinking. The former tradition is in continuity with biology. The latter takes up the nineteenth-century quest for origins and even returns to nineteenth-century interests in totemism and primitive promiscuity. By the late 1970s a new grand evolutionist tradition was encroaching on the social sciences,...
Concluding summary Mng
Functionalism had its beginnings in evolutionist thought. It came into its own as an anthropological perspective, partly through the influence of Durkheim on the cusp of evolutionist-functionalist thinking , but more definitively through the writings of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. Also crucial was the institutional base these latter two and their immediate successors created for the discipline worldwide. Although Malinowski succeeded in building up a great following, his major venture into...
The influence of Malinowski and RadcliffeBrown
Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown demanded loyalty from their students. Between them they persuaded virtually every anthropologist in the British Commonwealth that the old interests of anthropology - in evolution and diffusion - were no longer appropriate areas for major research. Most anthropologists in Britain and many in America followed Radcliffe-Brown's line. They conceived of anthropology as being about filling in the details of ethnography generalizing about particular societies and...
Two maverick eclectics
My focus in this last section is on just two scholars, whose maverick status is heightened by the fact that neither ended their careers in conventional anthropological writings nor even within anthropology departments. All the same, Gregory Bateson and Mary Douglas are both brilliant exemplars of anthropological theory's contribution to social thought. They remain significant for our discipline, while nevertheless neither leading from the front nor following the trends of their times. Structure...
Structuralism from linguistics to anthropology
'Structuralism' refers to those theoretical perspectives which give primacy to pattern over substance. For a structuralist, meaning comes through knowing how things fit together, not from understanding things in isolation. There are some similarities between structuralism and structural-func-tionalism both are concerned with relations between things. However, there are important differences. Structural-functionalism finds order within social relations. Structuralists are generally as interested...
Franz Boas and the rise of cultural relativism
Classic cultural relativism emerged from the work of Franz Boas and his students. For the first half of the twentieth century it was the dominant paradigm of American anthropology. Some adherents including Boas himself stressed the richness of cultures then generally thought of as 'primitive', and several again including Boas used relativist ideology to argue the case against racism, anti-Semitism, and nationalist zealotry. Others developed their ideas through the study of the relation between...
Feminism in anthropology
The feminist critique concerns both gender relations in particular societies and the idea of gender as a structuring principle in human society generally H. L. Moore 1988 vii . While the former may be regarded as essentially a substantive issue, the latter is a theoretical one and therefore merits the same treatment as, for example, Marxism, poststructuralism, or postmodernism - all perspectives with links to feminism in anthropology. From gender studies to feminist anthropology In her...
The functionalism of Malinowski
Malinowski's position in British anthropology is analogous to that of Boas in American anthropology see chapter 7 . Like Boas, Malinowski was a Central European natural scientist brought by peculiar circumstances to anthropology and to the English-speaking world. Like Boas, he objected to armchair evolutionism and invented a fieldwork tradition based on the use of the native language in 'participant observation'. Furthermore, both Boas and Malinowski were pompous but liberal intellectuals who...
Concluding summary Jit
Action-centred, processual, and Marxist perspectives represent the culmination of the 'social' tradition in anthropology. These perspectives, especially Marxism, have elements of all the preceding ones. Transac-tionalism, for example, has its roots in Malinowski's ideas on social organization, as well as in the sociology of Simmel and Weber. Different approaches within Marxism emphasize variously social evolution, diffusion globalization , function, structure, and even reflexivity. On the last...
Unilinear evolutionism
Unilinear evolutionism is the notion that there exists one dominant line of evolution. In other words, all societies pass through the same stages. Since societies will progress at different rates, those societies which have been slower will remain at a 'lower' level than those which progress more rapidly. Of course, all this begs the question of what exactly it means for social institutions to be 'progressing' or 'evolving'. Different unilinear evolutionists have emphasized different things...