A History of Anthropology

Claiming Individuality: The Cultural Politics of Distinction EditEd by VErEd Amit And noEl dyck
Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality VErEd Amit And nigEl rApport
Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City lEsliE J. bAnk
In Foreign Fields: The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration thomAs F. cArtEr
On the Game: Women and Sex Work sophiE dAy
Slave of Allah: Zacarias Moussaoui vs the USA kAthErinE c. donAhuE
A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security EditEd by thomAs EriksEn, EllEn bAl And oscAr sAlEmink
A History of Anthropology thomAs hyllAnd EriksEn And Finn siVErt niElsEn
Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives Third Edition thomAs hyllAnd EriksEn
Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology EditEd by thomAs hyllAnd EriksEn
Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology Third Edition thomAs hyllAnd EriksEn
What Is Anthropology? thomAs hyllAnd EriksEn
Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh kAty gArdnEr
Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge kAty gArdnEr And dAVid lEwis
Border Watch: Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control AlExAndrA hAll
Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives EditEd by diEtEr hAllEr And cris shorE
Anthropology’s World: Life in a Twenty-First Century Discipline ulF hAnnErz
Humans and Other Animals Cross-cultural Perspectives on Human–Animal Interactions sAmAnthA hurn
Culture and Well-Being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics EditEd by AlbErto corsín JiménEz
State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives EditEd by christiAn krohn- hAnsEn And knut g. nustAd
Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader EditEd by uli linkE And dAniEllE tAAnA smith
Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica pEtEr luEtchFord
The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy mAriAnnE mAEckElbErgh
The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development EditEd by dAVid mossE And dAVid lEwis
Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice dAVid mossE
Contesting Publics Feminism, Activism, Ethnography lynnE phillips And sAlly colE
Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable EditEd by AndrEw strAthErn, pAmElA J. stEwArt And nEil l. whitEhEAd
Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production mAruškA sVAšEk
Race and Ethnicity in Latin America Second Edition pEtEr wAdE
Race and Sex in Latin America pEtEr wAdE
The Capability of Places: Methods for Modelling Community Response to Intrusion and Change sAndrA wAllmAn
Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA EditEd by dustin m. wAx
Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka mArk p. whitAkEr
Anthropology, Culture and Society
Series Editors:
Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University and Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex
Published titles include:
A History of AntHropology
Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen
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first published 2001 by pluto press. second edition published 2013 345 Archway road, london n6 5AA
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Distributed in the United states of America exclusively by palgrave Macmillan, a division of st. Martin’s press llC, 175 fifth Avenue, new york, ny 10010
Copyright © thomas Hylland Eriksen and finn sivert nielsen 2001, 2013
the right of thomas Hylland Eriksen and finn sivert nielsen to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Series Preface vii Preface to the Second Edition viii Preface to the First Edition ix
1. Proto-Anthropology 1 Herodotus and other Greeks 1; After Antiquity 3; The European conquests and their impact 6; Why all this is not quite anthropology yet 10; The Enlightenment 11; Romanticism 15
2. Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman 20 Evolutionism and cultural history 21; Morgan 23; Marx 25; Bastian and the German tradition 27; Tylor and other Victorians 29; The Golden Bough and the Torres expedition 32; German diffusionism 35; The new sociology 38; Durkheim 39; Weber 41
3. Four Founding Fathers 46 The founding fathers and their projects 49; Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders 52; Radcliffe-Brown and the ‘natural science of society’ 55; Boas and historical particularism 58; Mauss and the total social prestation 61; Anthropology in 1930: parallels and divergences 64
4. Expansion and Institutionalisation 68 A marginal discipline? 69; Oxford and the LSE, Columbia and Chicago 72; The Dakar-Djibouti expedition 74; Culture and personality 77; Cultural history 80; Ethnolinguistics 82; The Chicago school 83; ‘Kinshipology’ 86; Functionalism’s last stand 90; Some British outsiders 92
5. Forms of Change 96 Neo-evolutionism and cultural ecology 99; Formalism and substantivism 104; The Manchester school 107; Methodological individualists at Cambridge 112; Role analysis and system theory 117
6. The Power of Symbols 120 From function to meaning 121; Ethnoscience and symbolic anthropology 125; Geertz and Schneider 127; Lévi-Strauss and structuralism 130; Early impact 133; The state of the art in 1968 135
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7. Questioning Authority 138 The return of Marx 139; Structural Marxism 141; The not-quite- Marxists 145; Political economy and the capitalist world system 147; Feminism and the birth of reflexive fieldwork 151; Ethnicity 155; Practice theory 158; The sociobiology debate and Samoa 161
8. The End of Modernism? 166 The end of modernism? 171; The postcolonial world 176; A new departure or a return to Boas? 179; Other positions 184
9. Global Networks 192 Towards an international anthropology? 194; Trends for the future 200; Biology and culture 203; Globalisation and the production of locality 211
Bibliography 221 Index 239
series preface
Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research.
We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’
By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays.
We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world.
Professor Vered Amit Dr Jon P. Mitchell
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preface to the second Edition
It would not be correct to claim that anthropology has changed dramatically in the twelve years that have passed since the publication of the first edition of this book. However, there are several reasons why we felt that a thorough revision and update was in order by now.
First, the non-metropolitan anthropologies – from Brazil to Russia, from Japan to India – were treated cursorily and somewhat superficially in the first edition. This has now, at least to the best of our abilities, been rectified. Recent scholarship on ‘other people’s anthropologies’ has been of great help here.
Second, there were a number of small errors, inaccuracies and ambiguities scattered around in the first edition. We cannot guarantee that they are all gone, but again, we have done our best.
Third, there have in fact been some slight changes or adjustments in the course that anthropology has been taking in the last few years. For example, the field of globalisation studies, an incipient and slightly naughty trend in the 1990s – naughty because it eschewed an assumed orthodoxy seeing anthropology as the study of small, fairly isolated societies – has grown into maturity. Few anthropolo- gists today see problems in studying the relationship between the global and the local, and most do, in one way or another.
Fourth, as a matter of fact, the early chapters have been revised and modified just as much as the latter ones. Indeed it may be said that the remote past has changed just as rapidly as the recent past. Partly we see the past in a different light because of recent changes; partly new research and a deepened understanding reveals new details and formerly ignored patterns.
It is not true, in other words, that the past is safe and immune to change since what has happened has happened. As anthropolo- gists interested in history have shown time and again, the past is something malleable and dynamic. Each generation has its own past. This is our anthropological past.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen Finn Sivert Nielsen
Oslo, November 2012
preface to the first Edition
This is an ambitious book, but not a pretentious one. It is ambitious in that it tries, within the space of relatively few pages, to make sense of the diverse history of anthropology. Our priorities, omissions and interpretations are bound to be contested, since there can be no single authoritative history of anything, least of all a sprawling, dynamic and disputed field like anthropology. Still, the book is unpretentious, since our aim throughout has been to offer a sober and balanced account of the historical growth of anthro pology as a discipline, not to propose a radical re-interpretation of it.
There exists a growing scholarly literature on the history of anthropology, which this textbook does not try to compete with. Nevertheless, we know of no existing book with exactly the same scope as this one. The scholarly literature is often specialised, and existing textbooks on anthropological history are either more theoretically oriented or more committed to one or a few professional traditions. Although we may not always have succeeded, we have strived to give an impression of the parallel, convergent and interdependent developments of all major traditions in social and cultural anthropology.
The book is chronologically ordered. Beginning with the ‘proto- anthropologies’ from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, it continues with the creation of academic anthropology and the growth of classical sociology during the nineteenth century. The third chapter concentrates on the four men who, by general consensus, are considered the founding fathers of twentieth-century anthropology, and the fourth chapter indicates how their work was continued, and diversified, by their students. The fifth and sixth chapters both deal with the same period – from about 1946 to about 1968, but concentrate on different trends: Chapter 5 discusses the theoretical controversies surrounding concepts of society and social integration, while Chapter 6 covers concepts of culture and symbolic meaning. In Chapter 7, the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s are presented, with emphasis on the impulses emanating from Marxism and feminism. Chapter 8 deals with the 1980s, concentrating on the postmodernist movement and its close cousin, postcolonialism, two critical trends, which seriously
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challenged the discipline’s self-confidence; while the ninth and final chapter presents a few of the major post-postmodern trends that emerged during the 1990s.
We do not consider the history of anthropology to be a linear tale of progress. Some ‘modern’ controversies, for example, have occupied scholars since the Enlightenment and even earlier. At the same time, we believe that there has been a steady, cumulative growth in knowledge and understanding within the subject, not least with regard to method. Moreover, as anthropology responds to changes in the outside world, its substantial focus changes accordingly. Thus, the movement from the early industrial and colonial age to the information age of global modernities has led the subject through a series of transformations, yet essentially it continues to raise the same questions that were asked 50, 100 or even 200 years ago.
Oslo/Copenhagen, July 2001 THE & FSN
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1 Proto-Anthropology
How long have anthropologists existed? Opinions are divided on this issue. The answer depends on what you mean by an anthropologist. People around the world have always been curious about their neighbours and more remote people. They have gossiped about them, fought them, married them and told stories about them. Some of their stories were written down. Some were later criticised as inaccurate or ethnocentric (or flatly racist). Some stories were compared with others, about other people, leading to general assumptions about ‘people elsewhere’, and what humans everywhere have in common. In this broad sense, we start an anthropological enquiry the moment a foreigner moves into the neighbouring flat.
If we restrict ourselves to anthropology as a scientific discipline, some would trace its roots back to the European Enlightenment during the eighteenth century; others would claim that anthropology did not arise as a science until the 1850s, others again would argue that anthropological research in its present-day sense only commenced after the First World War. Nor can we avoid such ambiguities.
It is beyond doubt, however, that anthropology, considered as the science of humanity, originated in the region we commonly refer to as ‘the West’, notably in four ‘Western’ countries: France, Britain, the USA and Germany. Historically speaking, this is a European discipline, and its practitioners, like those of all European sciences, occasionally like to trace its roots back to the ancient Greeks.
HERODOTUS AND OTHER GREEKS
Thanks to research carried out by anthropologists, historians and archaeologists, we today believe that ‘the ancient Greeks’ differed quite radically from ourselves. In the classical city-states, more than half the population were slaves; free citizens regarded manual labour as degrading, and democracy (which was also ‘invented’ by the Greeks) was probably more similar to the competitive potlatch feasts of the Kwakiutl (Chapter 4), than to the institutions described in modern constitutions (Finley 1973; P. Anderson 1974).
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2 A HiSTORy Of ANTHROPOlOGy
Going back to the Greeks is thus a long journey, and we peer into their world through cracked and smoky glass. We catch glimpses of little city-states surrounded by traditional Iron Age farmland where family and kinship formed the main social units, connected to the outside world through a network of maritime trade relationships between urban settlements along the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts. The trade in luxury goods and the free labour entailed by slavery brought considerable wealth to the cities, and the citizens of the polis, with their distaste for manual work, had at their disposal a large surplus, which they used, among other things, to wage war, and to build temples, stadiums, baths and other public buildings, where male citizens could meet and engage in philosophical disputes and speculations about how the world was put together.
It was in such a community that Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 484–425 bce) lived. Born in a Greek colonial town on the south-west coast of present-day Turkey, Herodotus began to travel as a young man and gained personal knowledge of the many foreign peoples that the Greeks maintained contacts with. Today, Herodotus is mainly remembered for his history of the Persian Wars (Herodotus 1982), but he also wrote detailed travel narratives from various parts of western Asia and Egypt, and (based on second-hand information) from as far away as the land of the Scythians on the northern coast of the Black Sea, the Ethiopians, and the peoples of the Indus valley. In these narratives, far removed as they are from our present world, we recognise a problem that has pursued anthropology, in various guises, up to this day: how should we relate to ‘the Others’? Are they basically like ourselves, or basically different? Most, if not all, anthropological theory has tried to strike a balance between these positions, and this is what Herodotus did too. Sometimes he is a prejudiced and ethnocentric ‘civilised man’, who disdains everything foreign. At other times he acknowledges that different peoples have different values because they live under different circumstances, not because they are morally deficient. Herodotus’ descriptions of language, dress, political and judicial institutions, crafts and economics are highly readable today. Although he sometimes clearly got the facts wrong, he was a meticulous scholar, whose books are often the only written sources we have about peoples of a distant past.
Many Greeks tested their wits against a philosophical paradox that touches directly on the problem of how we should relate to ‘the Others’. This is the paradox of universalism versus relativism. A present-day universalist would try to identify commonalities and
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PROTO-ANTHROPOlOGy 3
similarities (or even universals) between different societies, while a relativist would emphasise the uniqueness and particularity of each society or culture. The Sophists of Athens are sometimes described as the first philosophical relativists in the European tradition (several almost contemporary thinkers in Asia, such as Gautama Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tze, were concerned with similar questions). In Plato’s (427–347 bce) dialogues Protagoras and Gorgias, Socrates argues with the Sophists. We may picture them in dignified intellectual battle, surrounded by colourful temples and solemn public buildings, with their slaves scarcely visible in the shadows between the columns. Other citizens stand as spectators, while Socrates’ faith in a universal reason, capable of ascertaining universal truths, is confronted by the relativist view that truth will always vary with experience and what we would today call culture.
Plato’s dialogues do not deal directly with cultural differences. But they bear witness to the fact that cross-cultural encounters were part of everyday life in the city-states. The Greek trade routes stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to present-day Ukraine, they fought wars with Persians and many other ‘barbarians’. The very term ‘barbarian’ is Greek and means ‘foreigner’. To a Greek ear it sounded as if these aliens were only able to make unintelligible noises, which sounded like ‘bar-bar, bar-bar’. Similarly, in Russian, Germans are to this day called nemtsy (the mute ones): those who speak, but say nothing.
Aristotle (384–322 bce) also indulged in sophisticated speculations about the nature of humanity. In his philosophical anthropology he discusses the differences between humans in general and animals, and concludes that although humans have several needs in common with animals, only man possesses reason, wisdom and morality. He also argued that humans are fundamentally social by nature. In anthropology and elsewhere, such a universalistic style…