Anthropology Archive

The birth of anthropology and Europes intellectual climate

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The fact is that anthropology had its birth as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during what we might label the height of modernist thought—and at the apex of Western imperialist endeavours. Modernist and imperialist ways of thinking about things go very deep, and since anthropology could but be the child of its times, the intellectual and political climate of those times is deeply implicated in its own development. This is why present-day anthropology is mainly involved in a scrutiny of its own discourse on the primitive other, an ongoing deconstruction of its major concepts toward the end of uncovering the intellectual effects of the imperialist, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and the practical, political implications of them.

The brand new science of anthropology was faced at the turn of the century with the necessity of claiming its own intellectual space, over which it could be the guardian of truth and objectivity. It needed to produce its own object (cf. Fabian 1983). It was Malinowski, cited above as the promoter of 'the native point of view', who set the standards, the rules and norms, for modern ethnographic writing. Ethnography is the recording of an ethnos, and, as Peter Mason phrases it (1990:13), 'a form of translation and reduction'. 'All ethnography', he goes on to say (ibid.), 'is an experience of the confrontation with Other set down in writing, an act by which that Other is deprived of its specificity'. He notes that such writing conforms to particular stylistic and literary conventions. It must meet certain expectations. In producing a discourse on the Trobrianders, 'Malinowski was creating a work which is of the same substance intellectually as, say, James Joyce's Bloomsday' (Mason 1990:13; cf. Ardener 1985:57). Thus there is a sense in which 'the Trobrianders' as presented through this discourse do not have empirical reality, for, being the product of the ethnographic scientific discourse, they are but fiction.

The rhetorical genre which Malinowski created led to what Mason calls (1990:13) 'the naturalist or realist' monograph. It was a form of anthropological writing that was followed throughout the period of modernism, which Ardener (1985) situates between 1920 and 1975 for anthropology. In short, this realist genre through which the ethnographer presented his or her object (as an example of the West's colonized other of the South Pacific, Africa, or Australia) followed the naturalist pattern set by other studies of nature, those of the flora and fauna of far-flung parts of the world. Mason quite rightly classifies (1990:6, 15—17) 'the objects' of such studies of humans as the stuff of imaginary worlds, or the world of myth. Through the realist rhetoric of the anthropologist, the Trobrianders were naturalized, and thereby belong to one of those worlds transcended by modern civilization to be marked as an uncivilized part of nature, something which, to the modern spirit, was to be dominated and tamed. To objectify is to naturalize, and therefore to create distance between self and the object, whether it be animate or inanimate, human or stone. This ability of the scientist to move away from and transcend the object of enquiry is a measure of its arbitrariness, and thus lack of reason (cf. Bauman 1995:163). We see then that anthropological realism is not an innocent, value-free task, for it is a highly coloured presentation of a very specific kind. As such it is a creation of 'the reality of the other', and not a representation; as a creation it has its own 'reality effect' (cf. Mason 1990). Such presentations acquire their special signifying power by taking their place within a network of other imaginary worlds also created in the modernist spirit by the rest of the human sciences as they made their fit with the natural sciences. Within all these fields of human studies our own historically contingent and local values, truths and practices were usually raised to absolute principles from which all deviance was judged, dismissed, or, even worse, ignored. For example, the eighteenth-century value upon a particular type of logic and reasoning became the defining attribute of human nature.

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