cultural materialism
'Cultural materialism' is a broad heading, but it usually refers to the the specific kind of materialist approach advocated by fMarvin Harris. He developed it in a number of works, the most significantly being Cannibals and Kings 1977 and Cultural Materialism 1979 . Harris maintains that the material world exhibits deterministic influence over the nonmaterial world. Thus culture is a product of relations between things. In one of his more famous examples, Harris 1966 argues that the Hindu taboo...
The recent history of ecological anthropology
Attention to the impact of environments on human societies is longstanding in philosophy and geography, but in social and cultural anthropology, stress on the ecological dimension is relatively recent. During the first half of the twentieth century, social and cultural anthropology, whether in the British versions of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown or the American version of Boas, examined relationships within the social and cultural realm, with little direct attention to relations with the...
Dutch anthropology
Dutch anthropology has a distinguished and unique history, and there is no shortage of English-language publications aimed at explaining it to the outside world e.g., Kloos and Claessen 1975, 1981, 1991 . Essentially, there are two main distinctive anthropological traditions in the Netherlands, which in that country are commonly labelled 'cultural anthropology' including structural anthropology and 'sociology of non-Western societies'. Arguably, Dutch cultural anthropology began in colonial...
Origins and history
From its origins in the late eighteenth century, clinical psychiatry recognized that mental illness might be influenced, sometimes even caused, by a society's mores, roles and sentiments. Generally, the patterns of severe illness psychosis identified in European hospitals were taken as universal, whilst it was accepted that wide variations existed in everyday psychological functioning which could be attributed to 'race', religion, gender and class. In the first explicitly cross-cultural...
Houses and the Kachin
Among other things, the Kachin Leach 1954 are famous in anthropology as an example of a society that practises fmatrilateral cross-cousin marriage, an exchange relationship of alliance that takes place between two or more lineages related as wife-givers mayu and wife-takers dama . fLeach tells us that among the Kachin there exists a system of patrilineal clanship, with fclans made up of a number of localized flineages 1954 55 , although he adds that within villages, people of one lineage are...
Conclusion Xit
A concern with the mechanics of power and the relation of power to knowledge derived primarily from the writings of fMichel Foucault halted the involution of disciplinary and subfield specialization in its tracks. Within the anthropology of politics, a new post-Foucaultian micro-political paradigm emerged Ferguson 1990 at the same time as global transdisciplinary movements subaltern studies, black studies, and feminist studies made familiar concepts such as power, history, culture and class...
The end of synthetic anthropology
The diffusionist and functionalist schools which battled for anthropological paramountcy in the World War I era were both engendered by Darwinian biogeography although they represented themselves as diametrically opposed and historians have usually taken them on their own valuation . The diffusionists sustained nineteenth-century evolutionists' historical objectives, and resembled their predecessors in their description of the sequence of institutional changes leading to modern civilization....
Region definition and contemporary states
By convention, West Africa is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the south and west and by the world's largest desert, the Sahara, to the north. However these boundaries are most significant for the influences that flowed across them. Via its Atlantic seaboard, West Africa was incorporated into a system of world trade emergent from the late fifteenth century especially through the slave trade. Subsequent European colonization and Christian missionization proceeded largely, but not exclusively,...
Ethnography as product a history of ethnography
As a written account, an ethnography focuses on a particular population, place and time with the deliberate goal of describing it to others. So, often, did the writings of nineteenth-century explorers, missionaries, military agents, journalists, travellers, and reformers and these contain much information useful to anthropologists. What distinguishes the first ethnography, Louis Henry Morgan's The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois 1851 , from these other writings are two qualities its...
From ethnographic regionalism to psychological reductionism
With the increase in ethnographic research in the fieid, well-documented monographs have been produced which provide new data on shamanism. All of these, however, focus on a particular region and, while they enable us to gain a better understanding of the diverse social contexts in which shamanism is found, such monographs have shifted attention away from an interest in the comparative work required to formulate a general theory of the collective social and symbolic dimensions of the...
Structuralism and after
The new-found interest in cosmology is to a large extent attributable to the influence of the work of L vi-Strauss and his notion of the 'order of orders'. L vi-Strauss makes an analytic contrast between 'lived-in' orders and 'thought-of' orders. The former may be studied as part of the objective reality, he says, but 'no systematic studies of these orders can be undertaken without acknowledging the fact that social groups need to call upon orders of different kinds, corresponding to a field...
settlement patterns
Settlement patterns comprise the means by which humans place themselves and their dwellings in relation to the land, and the patterns of migration, aggregation and dispersal which give rise to their distribution on the land. The comparative study of settlement patterns is not highly developed in social or cultural anthropology. Although ad hoc studies of the phenomenon are common with regard to hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, the ethnographic study of settlement patterns has never become a...
Culture personality and the child
Mead's interest in children was bound up with her concern to demonstrate the 'cultural relativity' of thought, behaviour and personality. Like her teacher Boas and other cultural anthropologists, she argued that culture was the crucial variable in determining differences between human beings. So, for example, while a 'stormy adolescence' might characterize the experience of American young people, and delinquency be common there, this phenomenon was not universal. Comparing the American...
totemism
The term 'totamism' first appeared in print in 1791. The trader James Long related how an Ojibwa hunter, having 'accidentally' killed a bear, was accosted by an avenging bear who demanded an explanation. Although the Indian's apology was accepted, he remained disturbed, telling Long 1791 'Beaver, my faith is lost, my totam is angry, I shall never be able to hunt any more'. On the basis of comparable reports, J.F. McLennan 1869 posited a worldwide reverence for the 'mystical power' of living...
Systems theory in political anthropology
The real impetus to political anthropology came when British fstructural-functionalism confronted large African centralized states, functioning as units of findirect rule. These were more akin to the monarchies and republics of Europe than the small-scale communities or faboriginal societies to which political anthropologists had become accustomed. Structural-functionalists operated with a classically simple dichotomy between states and stateless or facephalous societies, with an absent-minded...
Religion and European expansion
It is a fundamental assumption of the discourse of modernity that in modern societies religion loses its social creativity and is forced to choose between either sterile conservatism or self-effacing assimilation to the secular world. In fact, new and highly original religious organizations proliferated in modern nation-states like Britain and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, resulting in unprecedented levels of lay involvement. Ideological pluralization, resulting in ecclesiastical...
Johan Pottier
individualism Claudia Barcellos Rezende friendship Americas Native North America hunting and gathering capitalism Bernard Saladin d'Anglure Arctic L vi-Strauss, Claude names and naming shamanism Philip Carl Salzman mass media methodology nomadism transhumance Philip Carl Salzman and Donald W.Attwood ecological anthropology Roger Sanjek Boas, Franz ethnography household network analysis race Sergey Sokolovskii and Valery Tishkov formalism and substantivism kingship modernism, modernity and...
New directions
Those interested in understanding music today find themselves faced with the task of understanding social worlds thoroughly penetrated by new media systems, the apparatus of transnational industrial, political and military structures, and the collapse of scientific certainties in the study of society and culture. These problems are keenly felt in disciplines with a tradition of commitment to the local and small-scale such as ethnomusicology and anthropology. Recent ethnomusicology has been...
dual organization
A society has a dual organization when it is divided in two, with each of its members belonging to one or to the other fmoiety i.e. half . This widespread type of social organization is an elementary means of obtaining, in fLeslie White's words, 'differentiation of structure, specialisation of function, and co-operation'. The general pattern allows, however, for considerable variation in forms assumed and functions or social role performed by moieties. Among the most elaborate examples of dual...
names and naming
The anthropological study of personal names or anthroponyms , ethnonyms and toponyms aroused little interest before the 1960s. This field seemed of secondary importance when compared with themes such as kinship, social organization and religion. Several pioneers of anthropology had indeed studied certain aspects of it. L.H. Morgan, for example had investigated the use of personal names among Native Americans, B.Malinowski had examined cosmology and reincarnation among the Trobrianders, and...
NeoMarxist critique
A major disruption of the received anthropological wisdom regarding 'development' and 'modernization' came with the rise of fdependency theory and a set of neo-Marxist critiques of both modernization theory and traditional anthropology. The contributions of Marxist anthropology are discussed elsewhere see Marxism and anthropology, world systems, political economy, mode of production here it is useful simply to point out that the neo-Marxist critiques of the 1970s fundamentally challenged two...
Myth and structural analysis
L vi-Strauss was careful to point out that a myth could only be compared with another myth. Between myth and other forms of language and activity there is only a relationship of aesthetic impingement or impressionistic rendering. Some practitioners of structural analysis, however, sought to establish this relationship in more normative, fDurkheimian terms. Of the myths of the Kwakiutl, for example, Walens says that the story of the creator being Q aneqelaku, the Transformer, 'expresses the...
Instrumentalist approaches
From the late 1960s, in theories of modernity and modernization, ethnicity was treated as a remnant of the pre-industrial social order, gradually declining in significance. It was a marginal phenomenon to be overcome by the advance of the modern state and processes of national integration and assimilation 'melting pot', or assimilationist ideology, prevalent in American cultural anthropology from the 1960s to the mid-1970s . Until the mid- 1970s ethnicity was defined structurally i.e. in terms...
Prehistory from Herder to Boas
We have already mentioned the proliferation of definitions of culture in mid-century American anthropology. Many of these definitions were collected in an extraordinary survey published by fKroeber and fKluckhohn in 1952 Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952 . This invaluable book collected and analysed dozens of definitions, as well as examining non-anthropological usage in English, German and French. What emerged was a particular story. According to Kroeber and Kluckhohn, the anthropological sense of...
Shamanism and postmodernism
Several anthropologists have even objected to the concept of shamanism itself. In 1966 fClifford Geertz asserted that shamanism was a dry and insipid category with which ethnographers of religion had devitalized their data. A few years later Robert Spencer described it as a residual category of the discipline. Finally Michael Taussig has attempted more recently, from a post-modernist perspective, to carry out a radical fdeconstruction of it as L vi-Strauss had done for totemism in seeing it as...
Formal models
Market models developed by economists have supplied many of the theoretical underpinnings for those anthropologists attempting to find continuities between diverse forms of trading practice in different cultures. For economists, a market is an arena of 'perfectly competitive transactions' between many buyers and sellers sharing complete market information about price, quality of goods and so on thereby an efficiency in production and distribution is achieved. Real markets only ever approximate...
From reading to writing
Clifford Geertz's career has interesting parallels with Schneider's Harvard beginnings, a short period in California and a longer one in Chicago, an attachment to a concept of culture as meaning derived in equal part from Parsons and the Boasian tradition in American anthropology, and oracular pronouncements in the 1960s on symbols and cultural systems and the idea of the person. But it also has its differences too Geertz left Chicago for the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1970...
Anthropology in an urban world
By the end of the 1990s, more than half the world's six billion people will live in cities. The proportion of city dwellers will slope upward even further in the next century. Many anthropologists with no special interests in urbanism already do fieldwork in cities and more will follow. But for those committed to continuing interplay between bottom-up and top-down urban anthropological approaches, there are several important areas for research. The Cold War cut off Western anthropologists from...
Epistemological relativism
This stands in contrast, however, to the debate about epistemological relativism which shows some signs, lately, of breaking down. Epistemological relativism, sometimes called 'cognitive' relativism, is often defined, by its critics, as the assertion that systems of knowledge possessed by different cultures are 'incommensurable' i.e. not comparable, not translatable, utterly alien, etc. , and that people in different cultures, therefore, are believed by epistemological relativists to live in...
An example Taiwanese and Korean shamans
If ethnography across East Asia has tended to stress local differences at the expense of regional continuities, it is not surprising. Fieldwork as a methodology directs attention to very profound local differences which can exist in the midst of apparent similarity. In this respect it is interesting to consider two recent books about shamanism in East Asia, by M.Wolf 1992 and L.Kendall 1988 , which share very similar concerns. Each is an account of one woman's life history and of her...
Structuralism and structuralists
The success, ambitions, and even failures of L vi-Strauss's structuralism are perhaps now being seen in some sort of perspective, but in the period from the 1960s to the early 1980s it dominated not only anthropology but many other domains. There was a structuralist vogue in literature, in philosophy, in history, even in cinema. Such very diverse writers as fBarthes, fFoucault, fLacan, fAlthusser and many literary critics have sometimes been seen as inspired by L vi-Strauss and described as...
witchcraft and sorcery
The terms 'witchcraft' and 'sorcery' are words taken from pre-Enlightenment Europe and applied to reported occult agencies in, for the most part, non-European, small-scale or tribal societies. The distinction in anthropology between the two kinds of malign occult action is usually credited to fEvans-Pritchard 1937 , who was translating a category difference in the thought of the Azande peoples of Central Africa. The essence of Evans-Pritchard's or rather the Zande's influential distinction is...
Food as cultural construction
Studies of the sociocultural dimensions of food take either a cultural structural or semiotic approach. The former treats food as 'good to think' within a fairly static cultural environment, as illustrated in numerous studies of binary classifications hot-cold, wet-dry, male-female, etc. , and introduces the idea that diets can be analysed as parts of a food code. In contrast, semiotic studies show that people manipulate food to make statements about and challenge social relations. While all...
great and little traditions
The issue of great and little traditions did not arise for the first generation of anthropologists who, following the example of Malinowski, mainly studied remote, self-contained, small-scale societies. It was only after World War II, when anthropologists began to study communities integrated within larger states and participating in centuries-old religious traditions such as Buddhism or Christianity, that the problem arose. The terms 'great' and 'little' traditions were actually introduced and...
Passive object or active subject
The studies by culture and personality theorists, like those by social anthropologists of the processes of socialization, did not lead to children becoming of much greater interest to mainstream anthropology. Indeed, one can argue that the assumption common to both approaches that children 'learned culture' or, more radically, were 'conditioned by culture', made children the more or less passive objects of adult ideas and practices, and thus of marginal interest to anthropologists. Even...
From primitive thought to mythical thought
In 1950 L vi-Strauss was elected to a chair of Comparative Religions which led him to put kinship temporarily to one side in order to devote himself, and his structural method, to mythology and indigenous classifications. First of all, he deconstructed the concept of totemism L vi-Strauss 1962 1963 . In the evolutionary perspective that prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, totemism had been considered as one of the first forms of primitive religion,...
Robertson Smith and the origins of Christian sacrifice
fWilliam Robertson Smith placed sacrifice at the centre of anthropological theories of religion, morality and kinship in 1886. Defining 'sacrifice' in the Encyclopedia Brittanica 9th edn , he wrote that the Latin word sacrificium, from which we have the English 'sacrifice', 'properly means an action within the sphere of things sacred to the gods .and strictly speaking cover s the whole field of sacred ritual' 1886 132 . He went on to claim, however, that the central feature of every act of...
family
'Family' is one of the words most commonly used in anthropological writings and discussion, and yet its meaning is neither always clear nor a matter of consensus. This is partly because in everyday use in Euro-American culture, the word covers a multitude of senses of relatedness and connection. It may for instance refer to the domestic group or household, to close kin who are not co-resident, such as parents and adult offspring, or to a much wider network or deeper genealogy of kinship, as in...
Types of family
In anthropological writings, different congregations of kin and faffines have been labelled as specific types of family. The fconjugal family refers to a heterosexual pair and their offspring, while the fextended family refers to at least two related conjugal families, and for instance may consist of a woman and man, their children, and the spouse and children of at least one of these, or two or more siblings, their spouses and children. The fstem family includes a couple, their unmarried...
primitive mentality
The idea of a primitive mentality is closely associated with the French philosopher fLucien L vy-Bruhl 1857-1939 who attempted to delineate its attributes 1910, 1922, 1927 . L vy-Bruhl remarked that he became interested in the possibility that modes of thought are not everywhere the same when a colleague at the cole Normal Sup rieure sent him a translation of the works of ancient Chinese philosophers, a text which he found quite incomprehensible. At the same time L vy-Bruhl was not convinced by...
Marx Engels and the official line
Marx himself was a revolutionary whose theoretical efforts were above all directed to the understanding, and eventual overthrow, of industrial capitalism. A strong case can be made for starting any appreciation of Marx with his most complete and mature statement of his position in the first volume of Capital. This is above all a work of political economy, and its empirical content is derived from the secondary literature on British industrial capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century. As such it...
Culture versus society
Not all anthropologists of the day were as enthusiastic about the concept of culture as the Boasians. Radcliffe-Brown's dismissal of culture as a 'vague abstraction' 1940 1952 190 was echoed elsewhere in British social anthropology, where 'culturalism' and 'culturalist' were employed as damning epithets for any analysis which sought above all to explicate a culture in its own terms. The usual antonym to 'culturalist' was 'structuralist' which, before the 1960s, usually referred to the study of...
body
In anthropology the human body is always recognized as a relative concept, conditioned and conditioning other complex entities that range from society to the cosmos. A key if little read contribution remains fMarcel Mauss's 1935 article 'Les techniques du corps', which draws attention to the universal influence of what today would be called 'culture' on people's use of their bodies and anticipates the later development of kinesics by R.Birdwhistell and others. Mauss instanced the cultural...
Ethnographic writing colonial traditions
Historical understanding of West Africa derives from archaeological investigations, oral traditions, the records of Arab travellers and African intellectuals, and, for the last four centuries, the writings of European travellers, explorers, traders and missionaries. From the late nineteenth century, these accounts became more systematic. The establishment of colonial rule in British colonies under the principle of f'indirect rule' that where possible African political institutions and customs...
Ethnicity and nationalism
The political map of this region has been redrawn several times during the last 150 years. After the disappointments of the 'springtime of nations' in 1848, Bismarck's united Germany became the region's first modern state and in spite of all the twentieth-century vicissitudes it has remained the most powerful. Ottoman and Habsburg Empires did not last long into the present century. With the collapse of the socialist supra-national states, the triumph of nationalist ideology now appears complete...
Prehistoric explorers and colonizers
There is a growing conviction among scholars that the forebears of the Polynesians came by way of Melanesia. They are associated with the makers of the so-called Lapita pottery, which is found scattered on the coasts of the Melanesian islands. Some bearers of the Lapita culture reached the Tonga Samoa region about 2000 BC, where in relative isolation the 'Ancestral Polynesian Culture' APC emerged Kirch 1984 . The construction of this culture is based on archaeological, linguistic and...
compadrazgo
Compodrazgo literally co-fatherhood is the Spanish form of fritual kinship established through the rites of the Catholic Church especially at baptism, confirmation and marriage between a person, his or her biological parents, and his or her god-parents. From Spain, compadrazgo has spread to Latin America where it is sometimes even more important than in its place of origin Mintz and Wolf 1950 van den Berghe and van den Berghe 1966 . At baptism, confirmation and marriage, an individual acquires...
Structural Marxism
What has come to be called, in retrospect, structural Marxism was a product of a very specific historical and intellectual conjuncture. Intellectually, structural Marxism was based on two major French influences the revisionist interpretations of Marx provided by the philosopher, fLouis Althusser, and applied to ethnographic problems by Claude Meillassoux and Emmanuel Terray and the more pervasive linguistic turn occasioned by L vi-Strauss's structuralism, and rendered into appropriate Marxist...
Ethnography as process doing ethnography
The selection of a particular population or site for ethnographic research is ordinarily related to some unanswered question or outstanding problem in the body of comparative anthropological theory. Personal predilections or connections of researchers also shape this selection, but the field-worker still must justify his or her choice in terms of some significant theory to which the project is addressed. Usually this justification is made explicit in a written proposal for funds to underwrite...
Prof Roger Sanjek
Department of Anthropology Queens College, City University of New York, USA Prof. Gopala Sarana University of Lucknow, India Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology Moscow, Russia Dr Jonathan Spencer Department of Social Anthropology University of Edinburgh, UK Dr Charles Stafford Department of Anthropology London School of Economics, UK Dr Charles Stewart Department of Anthropology University College London, UK Department of Social Anthropology The Queen's University of Belfast, UK