H I S T 0 R Y 0 F A I\ T H R 0 P 0 L 0 G Y • V 0 L U E 2 FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED Essays on British Social Anthropology Edited by George W Stocking, Jc
FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
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H I S T 0 R Y 0 F A I\ T H R 0 P 0 L 0 G Y • V 0 L U ~I E 2
FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
Edited by George W Stocking, Jc
From reviews of volumes in the History of Anthropology series
Volume I, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork
"This first volume focuses on ethnographic fieldwork, a keystone of cultural anthro pology that is at once a unique means of collecting data (participant observation is often spoken of as an 'anthropological' method) and a crucial rite of passage that transforms novices into professionals .... The collection as a whole is of high qual ity, presenting valuable information and provocative analyses. For an anthropolo gist, the essays by historians offer fresh perspectives that differentiate this book from others on fieldwork."-American Scientist
Volume 2, Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology
"This volume is likely to prove indispensable to historians of anthropology in gen eral and of British anthropology in particular. A wide range of historical skills are on display, from traditional textual analysis to historical sociology of the most sophisticated sort, and the more or less thorough chronological coverage extends from the era of classical evolutionism virtually up to the present."- Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume 3, Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture
''. .. a timely publication in the History of Anthropology series ... makes an im portant contribution to our understanding of the central role museums played in the development of anthropology from 1850 to 1920. It is one of the earliest voices in the emerging debate about the present state of ethnographic museums and raises a number of important political and philosophical issues that must be addressed in considering the future directions of these institutions."-American Journal of Sociology
Volume 4, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality
" ... tells of the brilliant American thinkers Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and how the latter two moved into the center stage of history as planners/thinkers for American society during and after WW IL Vignettes reveal Malinowski, John Layard, Abram Kardiner, Melville Herskovits, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo .... This book deserves a far wider audience than its obvious tar get .... It should be held in every community college and university library, in every town and city."-Choice
The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53715
ISBN 0-299-09904-0
Functionalism Historicized
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
EDITORIAL BOARD Talal Asad
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Hull James Boon
Department of Anthropology, Cornell University
James Clifford Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Donna Haraway Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Curtis Hinsley Department of History, Colgate University
Dell Hymes Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
Henrika Kuklick Department of History and Sociology of Science,
University of Pennsylvania
Functionalism Historicizcd
Edited by
L:andort:~~
The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53715
London WClE 6HA, England
Copyright © 1984 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under tide:
Functionalism historicized. (History of anthropology; v.2)
Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Functionalism (Social sciences)-History-Addresses,
essays, lectures. 2. Ethnology-Great Britain-History Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Stocking, George W.,
1928- . II. Series. GN363.F86 1984 306'.0941 84-40160
ISBN 0-299-09900-8 ISBN 0-299-09904-0 (paper)
Contents
IN THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF jOHN loCKE
Thomas de Zengotita 10
Two TRADITIONS" IN BRITISH SocIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Robert Alun Jones 31
59
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM, 1892-1899 James Urry
83
DR. DURKHEIM AND MR. BROWN:
COMPARATIVE SocIOLOGY AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1910 Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr.
106
FUNCTION, HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY:
Hilda Kuper 192
James Whitman 214
INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS
Functionalism Historicized
FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
To what extent one may appropriately speak of differing "national traditions" in such a problematically "scientific" discipline as anthropology is a moot mat ter. Although the often-argued cultural variability of systems of belief and knowledge pulls in a quite opposite direction, the discipline's name bespeaks a unity of scientific discourse, and its historiographers characteristically write as if this were the case. But if the logic of logos discourages the addition of nationalizing adjectives, one suspects that the chapter headings and the in dex entries of works in German and in English on the history of anthropol ogy would suggest quite substantial differences in national perspective (cf. Muhlmann 1968; Harris 1968), and several symposia on "national traditions in anthropology" have indicated a considerable heterogeneity of historical development (Diamond, ed. 1980; Gerholm & Hannerz, eds. 1982). True, the editor of one of them spoke of a single "international anthropology" as a "diffused technic" now being exported "in various permutations and com binations" to academic centers all over the world (Diamond, ed. 1980:11); but if that comment perhaps suggests something about historically emergent rela tionships of knowledge and power, it does not do justice to the historical di versity of the discipline.
Indeed, the unity of anthropology as a discipline is itself historically prob lematic. Our most widely held models of the structure of knowledge and the emergence of disciplines are those of a tree or a segmentary lineage: disci plines emerge by branching or fission. From this perspective, one might per haps think of anthropology not as one branch of the human sciences but as the end growth of the trunk itself. And indeed it may enrich our under standing to think of anthropology circa 1900 in such terms-as the residuary disciplinary legatee of an holistic approach to man, invoked in a discourse of the discarded. With the development of specialized disciplines devoted pri marily to the study of the various manifestations of "civilized" human nature -the psychology of rational consciousness, the economy of money, the so cial organization of European societies, the politics of the state, the history of written sources-anthropology was left to study analogous and often oppo sitionally conceived manifestations of human nature in the life of dark-skinned
3
4 FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
"savages." Certainly, some practitioners thought of the discipline in terms that might be so construed-although in this context the unity of anthro pology could still be seen as historically contingent and likely to fragment (cf. Boas 1904).
On the other hand, it may be that the model of discipline fission does not adequately represent the historical emergence of anthropology. Perhaps anthropology may better be thought of in terms of a model of fusion: the coming together of a number of historically and conceptually distinguishable modes of scientific and other scholarly inquiry-comparative anatomy, com parative psychology, comparative philology, archeology, folklore, among others -in relation to a specific subject matter, which historically has been for the most part that encompassed by the nineteenth-century image of the "dark skinned savage." If the history of this fusion is obscured by the umbrella-usage adopted around 1870 in the Anglo-American traditions, it was then still evi dent in the full titles of German anthropological societies, which were devoted to anthropologie, ethnologie, und urgeschichte, and in the still current usage of "anthropology" on the European continent to refer to the physical study of man. In France, where "ethnology" and "anthropology" have had quite dis tinct histories, the establishment of an inclusive national "anthropological" society is in fact an event of the last several years (Condominas et al., eds. 1979). Variable nationally, this fusion has been imperfect even in the Anglo American context, where the departmental cohabitation of social and bio logical anthropologists has often been tension-ridden, and in at least one in stance has ended in divorce-and where the formal national organizational unity of the discipline has recently become somewhat problematic, as some component subdisciplinary groups contemplate nonparticipation in a restruc tured American Anthropological Association (A.A.A. 1983).
Another way of looking at the matter is to suggest that the general tradi tion we call retrospectively "anthropological" embodies a number of antino mies logically inherent or historically embedded in the Western intellectual tradition: an ontological opposition between materialism and idealism, an epistemological opposition between empiricism and apriorism, a substantive opposition between the biological and the cultural, a methodological opposi tion between the nomothetic and the idiographic, an attitudinal opposition between the racialist and the egalitarian, an evaluational opposition between the progressivist and the primitivist-among others. Although such opposi tions do not form mutually exclusive antithetical groupings, it is possible to view the study of human unity-in-diversity historically in terms of their vary ing manifestations in differing traditional orientations (or perduring paradigms) -the historical/ethnological, the developmental/evolutionary, the polygenetic/ physical anthropological, the functional/synchronic, and perhaps others-as well as within different subdisciplines, in different national traditions, and
FUNCTIONALISM HrsTORICIZED 5
in different historical periods-as we hope will be by implication manifest in the Miscellaneous Study included in the present volume (cf. Stocking 1981).
Yet another factor contributing to the diversity of national anthropologi cal traditions has been their differing histories of national and colonial de velopment, and their consequently differing confrontations with the Other. "Otherness" is surely a multidimensional phenomenon, which may be envi sioned in terms of the crossing of various sorts of boundaries, including those of language, body type, class, and time (as well as others such as gender). National anthropological traditions differ as to whether their primary experi ence of otherness has been "internal" or "external" -whether the anthropo logically significant "other" is a class (e.g., the peasantry) within the territory of the national society, or a geographically and culturally marginal ethnic group (e.g., the "Celtic fringe" of Great Britain), or an historically significant ances tral population (e.g., the Saxon), or an expropriated racial group within an internal empire (e.g., the American Indian), or the distant populations to whom the "White Man's Burden" of imperial exploitation was carried overseas. In these terms we may contrast anthropologies of nation-building and empire building, and within the former we may distinguish between those continen tal European traditions where strong traditions of Volkskunde focussed on the internal peasant others who composed the nation, or the potential nations within an imperial state, and those postcolonial nation-building anthropolo gies of the Third World, whose relation to internal otherness in some cases approximates that of an internal colonialism.
And finally, we may perhaps distinguish between metropolitan and periph eral anthropologies, or between anthropologies along some scale of knowledge/ power: the hegemonic anthropologies of the United States, Great Britain, France, and perhaps the Soviet Union; the postimperial anthropology of the German tradition; the secondary metropolitan anthropologies of Scandinavia and central Europe; the "white settler" anthropologies of Canada and Brazil; and the various "postcolonial" anthropologies struggling to define their own peculiar national identities or to adapt the "diffused technic" of "international anthropology" to the problems of national development (cf. Stocking 1982).
The major European anthropological traditions-the British, the French, and the German-doubtless exemplify the respective national manifestations of the "scientific spirit" described many years ago by ]. T. Merz in his magisterial history of science in the nineteenth century (1904:1). And while they can scarcely be disposed in these terms, one can see them also in relation to the characteristic national preoccupations Michel Foucault noted in his discus sion of the emergence of the human sciences: life, language, and labor (1970: 250). France was the home of comparative anatomy, and this was reflected in the predominance of physical anthropology until the early decades of the
6 FUNCTIONALISM H1STORICIZED
twentieth century. Germany was the home of comparative philology, and, while the German tradition in anthropology was heavily influenced also by physical anthropology, it is there that we look for the roots of linguistic an thropology. So also, Britain was the home of political economy, and, while we can scarcely characterize the British anthropological tradition as a direct offshoot, it can easily be regarded as the antiscience of political economy, in sofar as it attempted to bring the apparently irrational behavior of uncivilized man within the framework of utilitarian explanation.
There were in fact significant Germanic influences on the British anthro pological tradition in the nineteenth century, especially during the early "eth nological" period dominated by James Cowles Prichard (Stocking 1973), as well as in the thought of such figures as Henry Maine and William Robertson Smith (see Jones in this volume). Nevertheless, the contrast between the Brit ish and the German traditions is quite striking, as the relative neglect of lin guistic anthropology in the modern British tradition attests (Henson 1974). From this perspective one notes also the irreducible residue of intellectual miscommunication when Friedrich Max Muller, the Kantian ambassador of comparative philology to the British empiricists, tried to accommodate an ultimately idealistic and apriorist position to Tylorian and Darwinian evolu tionism (Schrempp 1983; cf. Leopold 1980). On the whole, the contrast be tween the British and the Germanic traditions remains quite striking.
In seeking the roots of British anthropology, it has been customary, both for retrospectively minded practitioners (Radcliffe-Brown 1958; Evans-Pritchard 1964) and disciplinary historians (Burrow 1966) to look to the eighteenth century Scottish "conjectural historians," who-much influenced by Montes quieu-were quite sociological in outlook, and made some use of available ethnographic information to discuss the manifestations of natural human capacity in the behavior of "rude" or "savage" man (Bryson 1945). But in the light of the deeper philosophically rooted contrast between British and Ger man anthropology, it seems appropriate to return to the thought of John Locke, the philosopher most quintessentially identified with the British intellectual tradition in so many of its aspects-epistemological, psychological, political, economic, etc. Although the ethnographic documentation for his suggestion that "in the beginning, all the world was America" consisted of little more than a reference to Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Locke's thought conditioned later British anthropology in a variety of ways that have only begun to be explored (see Zengotita in this volume). If other currents of intellectual influence and historical experience flowed into the later British functional tradition, Locke seems an appropriate place to begin placing that tradition in historical context.
To jump from Locke to two second-generation evolutionary writers, skip ping over eighteenth-century Scottish developmentalists, pre-Darwinian eth nologists, and the great figures of classical evolutionary anthropology-as well
FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED 7
as all that surrounded them and lay between-is to leave untouched vast areas of the British anthropological tradition. Even limiting our focus to the func tionalist tradition, there is much more to be said than can be encompassed in a volume of this size. We have dealt only incidentally with its colonial con text (cf. Asad, ed. 1973; Loizos 1977), and much more could be said to place it in the context of other currents within British anthropology (cf. Trigger 1980). In undertaking to give a posteriori thematic unity to a varied group of contributions, we have emphasized certain aspects of the immediate intel lectual and cultural context in which the modern British social anthropologi cal tradition emerged-the fundamental intellectual tensions in two immediately precursory evolutionary writers (Jones); the ideological context of traditional British "folk models" of the polity (Kuklick); the ethnographic manifestation of the general anthropological orientation from which social anthropology sought to distinguish itself (Urry); the most important single foreign intellec tual influence (Stocking, ed.); the immediate contexts of intellectual opposi tion in which the dehistoricization and refinement of functionalist anthro pology took place (Stocking); and the persistence of historical interests within the functionalist tradition (Kuper).
As early as 1950, historical interests were in fact strongly reasserted by one of the leading figures in the "structural-functionalist" school, when Evans Pritchard argued in his Marett Lecture that social anthropology was one of the humanities rather than a "natural science of society." Echoing from the very precincts in which Radcliffe-Brownian social anthropology had first es tablished itself, his insistence that "social anthropology, for all its present dis regard of history," was "itself a kind of historiography" (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 145, 148; cf. 1970), reminds us how historically problematic the notion of "dehistoricization'' must be. Certainly many of those who today are calling it into question look back to Evans-Pritchard for historical validation (Lewis 1984).
It may yet be premature to suggest that anthropology is finally reaching the moment, foreseen by the historian F. W. Maitland back at the turn of the cen tury, when it "will have the choice between being history and being nothing" (Bock 1956:18). Facing today the same sort of demographic and institutional problems that confront other hegemonic anthropologies in their postclassical, postcolonial period (cf. Riviere n.d.), British anthropology seems now in a state of considerable intellectual indeterminacy. What will emerge lies beyond the reach of this volume. But perhaps Functionalism Historicized-in the context of any other recent historical contributions-may contribute to the outcome.
8 FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
Acknowledgments
Aside from the editor, the editorial board, the contributors, and the staff of the University of Wisconsin Press, several other individuals and organizations facilitated the preparation of this volume. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., provided a grant to underwrite editorial ex penses. The staffs of the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology (especially Kathryn Barnes), the Morris Fishbein Center for the Study of the History of Science and Medicine (Elizabeth Bitoy), and the Social Science Division Duplicating Service provided necessary support. David Koester served as editorial assistant, and Bernard Cohn, John Comaroff, Raymond Fogelson, Samuel Sandler, and Howard Stein offered editorial advice. Our thanks to them all.
References Cited
A.A.A. (American Anthropological Association). 1983. Anthropology Newsletter 24(6/8). Asad, T., ed., 1973. Anthropology and the colonial encounter. London. Boas, E 1904. The history of anthropology. In The shaping of American anthropology,
1883-1911: A Franz Boas reader, ed. G. W. Stocking, Jr., 23-36. New York (1974). Bock, K. 1956. The acceptance of histories: Toward a perspective for social science.
Berkeley. Br-yson, G. 1945. Man and society: The Scottish inquiry of the eighteenth century. Princeton. Burrow, J. 1966. Evolution and society: A study in Victorian social theory. Cambridge. Condominas, G., et al., eds. 1979. L'Anthropologie en France: Situation actuelle et avenir.
Paris. Diamond, S., ed. 1980. Anthropology: Ancestors and heirs. The Hague. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1964. Social anthropology and other essays. New York. ---. 1970. Social anthropology at Oxford. Man 5:704. Foucault, M. 1970. The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York. Gerholm, T., & U. Hannerz, eds. 1982. The shaping of national anthropologies. Ethnos
47 (I/II). Harris, M. 1968. The rise of anthropological theory: A history of theories of culture. New York. Henson, H. 1974. British social anthropologists and language. London. Kuklick, H. 1978. The sins of the fathers: British anthropology and African colonial
administration. Res. Soc. Knowl. Sci. Art. 1:93-119. Leopold, J. 1980. Culture in comparative and evolutionary perspective: E. B. Tylor and the
making of Primitive Culture. Berlin. Lewis, I. M. 1984. The future of the past in British social anthropology. Vienna]. Anth.
(In press.) Loizos, P. 1977. Personal evidence: Comments on an acrimonious argument. Anth. Forum
4:1-8. Merz, J. T. 1904. A history of European thought in the nineteenth century. 4 vols. London.
FUNCTIONALISM HrsTORICIZED
9
Riviere, P. n.d. Changing shapes and directions: The decade ahead. Unpublished manuscript.
Schrempp, G. 1983. The re-education of Friedrich Max Muller: Intellectual appropria tion and epistemological antinomy in mid-Victorian evolutionary thought. Man 18:90-110.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. 1973. From chronology to ethnology: James Cowles Prichard and British anthropology, 1800-1850. In Prichard, Researches into the physical history of man. Chicago.
---. 1981. Apes, grandfathers, and Rubicons: Some thoughts on an enduring ten sion in anthropology. Symposium on ''Anthropological implications of evolution ary theory," Chapel Hill, March 2.…
FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
Edited by George W Stocking, Jc
From reviews of volumes in the History of Anthropology series
Volume I, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork
"This first volume focuses on ethnographic fieldwork, a keystone of cultural anthro pology that is at once a unique means of collecting data (participant observation is often spoken of as an 'anthropological' method) and a crucial rite of passage that transforms novices into professionals .... The collection as a whole is of high qual ity, presenting valuable information and provocative analyses. For an anthropolo gist, the essays by historians offer fresh perspectives that differentiate this book from others on fieldwork."-American Scientist
Volume 2, Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology
"This volume is likely to prove indispensable to historians of anthropology in gen eral and of British anthropology in particular. A wide range of historical skills are on display, from traditional textual analysis to historical sociology of the most sophisticated sort, and the more or less thorough chronological coverage extends from the era of classical evolutionism virtually up to the present."- Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume 3, Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture
''. .. a timely publication in the History of Anthropology series ... makes an im portant contribution to our understanding of the central role museums played in the development of anthropology from 1850 to 1920. It is one of the earliest voices in the emerging debate about the present state of ethnographic museums and raises a number of important political and philosophical issues that must be addressed in considering the future directions of these institutions."-American Journal of Sociology
Volume 4, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality
" ... tells of the brilliant American thinkers Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and how the latter two moved into the center stage of history as planners/thinkers for American society during and after WW IL Vignettes reveal Malinowski, John Layard, Abram Kardiner, Melville Herskovits, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo .... This book deserves a far wider audience than its obvious tar get .... It should be held in every community college and university library, in every town and city."-Choice
The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53715
ISBN 0-299-09904-0
Functionalism Historicized
Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
EDITORIAL BOARD Talal Asad
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Hull James Boon
Department of Anthropology, Cornell University
James Clifford Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Donna Haraway Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Curtis Hinsley Department of History, Colgate University
Dell Hymes Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
Henrika Kuklick Department of History and Sociology of Science,
University of Pennsylvania
Functionalism Historicizcd
Edited by
L:andort:~~
The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53715
London WClE 6HA, England
Copyright © 1984 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under tide:
Functionalism historicized. (History of anthropology; v.2)
Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Functionalism (Social sciences)-History-Addresses,
essays, lectures. 2. Ethnology-Great Britain-History Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Stocking, George W.,
1928- . II. Series. GN363.F86 1984 306'.0941 84-40160
ISBN 0-299-09900-8 ISBN 0-299-09904-0 (paper)
Contents
IN THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF jOHN loCKE
Thomas de Zengotita 10
Two TRADITIONS" IN BRITISH SocIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Robert Alun Jones 31
59
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM, 1892-1899 James Urry
83
DR. DURKHEIM AND MR. BROWN:
COMPARATIVE SocIOLOGY AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1910 Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr.
106
FUNCTION, HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY:
Hilda Kuper 192
James Whitman 214
INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS
Functionalism Historicized
FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
To what extent one may appropriately speak of differing "national traditions" in such a problematically "scientific" discipline as anthropology is a moot mat ter. Although the often-argued cultural variability of systems of belief and knowledge pulls in a quite opposite direction, the discipline's name bespeaks a unity of scientific discourse, and its historiographers characteristically write as if this were the case. But if the logic of logos discourages the addition of nationalizing adjectives, one suspects that the chapter headings and the in dex entries of works in German and in English on the history of anthropol ogy would suggest quite substantial differences in national perspective (cf. Muhlmann 1968; Harris 1968), and several symposia on "national traditions in anthropology" have indicated a considerable heterogeneity of historical development (Diamond, ed. 1980; Gerholm & Hannerz, eds. 1982). True, the editor of one of them spoke of a single "international anthropology" as a "diffused technic" now being exported "in various permutations and com binations" to academic centers all over the world (Diamond, ed. 1980:11); but if that comment perhaps suggests something about historically emergent rela tionships of knowledge and power, it does not do justice to the historical di versity of the discipline.
Indeed, the unity of anthropology as a discipline is itself historically prob lematic. Our most widely held models of the structure of knowledge and the emergence of disciplines are those of a tree or a segmentary lineage: disci plines emerge by branching or fission. From this perspective, one might per haps think of anthropology not as one branch of the human sciences but as the end growth of the trunk itself. And indeed it may enrich our under standing to think of anthropology circa 1900 in such terms-as the residuary disciplinary legatee of an holistic approach to man, invoked in a discourse of the discarded. With the development of specialized disciplines devoted pri marily to the study of the various manifestations of "civilized" human nature -the psychology of rational consciousness, the economy of money, the so cial organization of European societies, the politics of the state, the history of written sources-anthropology was left to study analogous and often oppo sitionally conceived manifestations of human nature in the life of dark-skinned
3
4 FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
"savages." Certainly, some practitioners thought of the discipline in terms that might be so construed-although in this context the unity of anthro pology could still be seen as historically contingent and likely to fragment (cf. Boas 1904).
On the other hand, it may be that the model of discipline fission does not adequately represent the historical emergence of anthropology. Perhaps anthropology may better be thought of in terms of a model of fusion: the coming together of a number of historically and conceptually distinguishable modes of scientific and other scholarly inquiry-comparative anatomy, com parative psychology, comparative philology, archeology, folklore, among others -in relation to a specific subject matter, which historically has been for the most part that encompassed by the nineteenth-century image of the "dark skinned savage." If the history of this fusion is obscured by the umbrella-usage adopted around 1870 in the Anglo-American traditions, it was then still evi dent in the full titles of German anthropological societies, which were devoted to anthropologie, ethnologie, und urgeschichte, and in the still current usage of "anthropology" on the European continent to refer to the physical study of man. In France, where "ethnology" and "anthropology" have had quite dis tinct histories, the establishment of an inclusive national "anthropological" society is in fact an event of the last several years (Condominas et al., eds. 1979). Variable nationally, this fusion has been imperfect even in the Anglo American context, where the departmental cohabitation of social and bio logical anthropologists has often been tension-ridden, and in at least one in stance has ended in divorce-and where the formal national organizational unity of the discipline has recently become somewhat problematic, as some component subdisciplinary groups contemplate nonparticipation in a restruc tured American Anthropological Association (A.A.A. 1983).
Another way of looking at the matter is to suggest that the general tradi tion we call retrospectively "anthropological" embodies a number of antino mies logically inherent or historically embedded in the Western intellectual tradition: an ontological opposition between materialism and idealism, an epistemological opposition between empiricism and apriorism, a substantive opposition between the biological and the cultural, a methodological opposi tion between the nomothetic and the idiographic, an attitudinal opposition between the racialist and the egalitarian, an evaluational opposition between the progressivist and the primitivist-among others. Although such opposi tions do not form mutually exclusive antithetical groupings, it is possible to view the study of human unity-in-diversity historically in terms of their vary ing manifestations in differing traditional orientations (or perduring paradigms) -the historical/ethnological, the developmental/evolutionary, the polygenetic/ physical anthropological, the functional/synchronic, and perhaps others-as well as within different subdisciplines, in different national traditions, and
FUNCTIONALISM HrsTORICIZED 5
in different historical periods-as we hope will be by implication manifest in the Miscellaneous Study included in the present volume (cf. Stocking 1981).
Yet another factor contributing to the diversity of national anthropologi cal traditions has been their differing histories of national and colonial de velopment, and their consequently differing confrontations with the Other. "Otherness" is surely a multidimensional phenomenon, which may be envi sioned in terms of the crossing of various sorts of boundaries, including those of language, body type, class, and time (as well as others such as gender). National anthropological traditions differ as to whether their primary experi ence of otherness has been "internal" or "external" -whether the anthropo logically significant "other" is a class (e.g., the peasantry) within the territory of the national society, or a geographically and culturally marginal ethnic group (e.g., the "Celtic fringe" of Great Britain), or an historically significant ances tral population (e.g., the Saxon), or an expropriated racial group within an internal empire (e.g., the American Indian), or the distant populations to whom the "White Man's Burden" of imperial exploitation was carried overseas. In these terms we may contrast anthropologies of nation-building and empire building, and within the former we may distinguish between those continen tal European traditions where strong traditions of Volkskunde focussed on the internal peasant others who composed the nation, or the potential nations within an imperial state, and those postcolonial nation-building anthropolo gies of the Third World, whose relation to internal otherness in some cases approximates that of an internal colonialism.
And finally, we may perhaps distinguish between metropolitan and periph eral anthropologies, or between anthropologies along some scale of knowledge/ power: the hegemonic anthropologies of the United States, Great Britain, France, and perhaps the Soviet Union; the postimperial anthropology of the German tradition; the secondary metropolitan anthropologies of Scandinavia and central Europe; the "white settler" anthropologies of Canada and Brazil; and the various "postcolonial" anthropologies struggling to define their own peculiar national identities or to adapt the "diffused technic" of "international anthropology" to the problems of national development (cf. Stocking 1982).
The major European anthropological traditions-the British, the French, and the German-doubtless exemplify the respective national manifestations of the "scientific spirit" described many years ago by ]. T. Merz in his magisterial history of science in the nineteenth century (1904:1). And while they can scarcely be disposed in these terms, one can see them also in relation to the characteristic national preoccupations Michel Foucault noted in his discus sion of the emergence of the human sciences: life, language, and labor (1970: 250). France was the home of comparative anatomy, and this was reflected in the predominance of physical anthropology until the early decades of the
6 FUNCTIONALISM H1STORICIZED
twentieth century. Germany was the home of comparative philology, and, while the German tradition in anthropology was heavily influenced also by physical anthropology, it is there that we look for the roots of linguistic an thropology. So also, Britain was the home of political economy, and, while we can scarcely characterize the British anthropological tradition as a direct offshoot, it can easily be regarded as the antiscience of political economy, in sofar as it attempted to bring the apparently irrational behavior of uncivilized man within the framework of utilitarian explanation.
There were in fact significant Germanic influences on the British anthro pological tradition in the nineteenth century, especially during the early "eth nological" period dominated by James Cowles Prichard (Stocking 1973), as well as in the thought of such figures as Henry Maine and William Robertson Smith (see Jones in this volume). Nevertheless, the contrast between the Brit ish and the German traditions is quite striking, as the relative neglect of lin guistic anthropology in the modern British tradition attests (Henson 1974). From this perspective one notes also the irreducible residue of intellectual miscommunication when Friedrich Max Muller, the Kantian ambassador of comparative philology to the British empiricists, tried to accommodate an ultimately idealistic and apriorist position to Tylorian and Darwinian evolu tionism (Schrempp 1983; cf. Leopold 1980). On the whole, the contrast be tween the British and the Germanic traditions remains quite striking.
In seeking the roots of British anthropology, it has been customary, both for retrospectively minded practitioners (Radcliffe-Brown 1958; Evans-Pritchard 1964) and disciplinary historians (Burrow 1966) to look to the eighteenth century Scottish "conjectural historians," who-much influenced by Montes quieu-were quite sociological in outlook, and made some use of available ethnographic information to discuss the manifestations of natural human capacity in the behavior of "rude" or "savage" man (Bryson 1945). But in the light of the deeper philosophically rooted contrast between British and Ger man anthropology, it seems appropriate to return to the thought of John Locke, the philosopher most quintessentially identified with the British intellectual tradition in so many of its aspects-epistemological, psychological, political, economic, etc. Although the ethnographic documentation for his suggestion that "in the beginning, all the world was America" consisted of little more than a reference to Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies, Locke's thought conditioned later British anthropology in a variety of ways that have only begun to be explored (see Zengotita in this volume). If other currents of intellectual influence and historical experience flowed into the later British functional tradition, Locke seems an appropriate place to begin placing that tradition in historical context.
To jump from Locke to two second-generation evolutionary writers, skip ping over eighteenth-century Scottish developmentalists, pre-Darwinian eth nologists, and the great figures of classical evolutionary anthropology-as well
FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED 7
as all that surrounded them and lay between-is to leave untouched vast areas of the British anthropological tradition. Even limiting our focus to the func tionalist tradition, there is much more to be said than can be encompassed in a volume of this size. We have dealt only incidentally with its colonial con text (cf. Asad, ed. 1973; Loizos 1977), and much more could be said to place it in the context of other currents within British anthropology (cf. Trigger 1980). In undertaking to give a posteriori thematic unity to a varied group of contributions, we have emphasized certain aspects of the immediate intel lectual and cultural context in which the modern British social anthropologi cal tradition emerged-the fundamental intellectual tensions in two immediately precursory evolutionary writers (Jones); the ideological context of traditional British "folk models" of the polity (Kuklick); the ethnographic manifestation of the general anthropological orientation from which social anthropology sought to distinguish itself (Urry); the most important single foreign intellec tual influence (Stocking, ed.); the immediate contexts of intellectual opposi tion in which the dehistoricization and refinement of functionalist anthro pology took place (Stocking); and the persistence of historical interests within the functionalist tradition (Kuper).
As early as 1950, historical interests were in fact strongly reasserted by one of the leading figures in the "structural-functionalist" school, when Evans Pritchard argued in his Marett Lecture that social anthropology was one of the humanities rather than a "natural science of society." Echoing from the very precincts in which Radcliffe-Brownian social anthropology had first es tablished itself, his insistence that "social anthropology, for all its present dis regard of history," was "itself a kind of historiography" (Evans-Pritchard 1962: 145, 148; cf. 1970), reminds us how historically problematic the notion of "dehistoricization'' must be. Certainly many of those who today are calling it into question look back to Evans-Pritchard for historical validation (Lewis 1984).
It may yet be premature to suggest that anthropology is finally reaching the moment, foreseen by the historian F. W. Maitland back at the turn of the cen tury, when it "will have the choice between being history and being nothing" (Bock 1956:18). Facing today the same sort of demographic and institutional problems that confront other hegemonic anthropologies in their postclassical, postcolonial period (cf. Riviere n.d.), British anthropology seems now in a state of considerable intellectual indeterminacy. What will emerge lies beyond the reach of this volume. But perhaps Functionalism Historicized-in the context of any other recent historical contributions-may contribute to the outcome.
8 FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED
Acknowledgments
Aside from the editor, the editorial board, the contributors, and the staff of the University of Wisconsin Press, several other individuals and organizations facilitated the preparation of this volume. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., provided a grant to underwrite editorial ex penses. The staffs of the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology (especially Kathryn Barnes), the Morris Fishbein Center for the Study of the History of Science and Medicine (Elizabeth Bitoy), and the Social Science Division Duplicating Service provided necessary support. David Koester served as editorial assistant, and Bernard Cohn, John Comaroff, Raymond Fogelson, Samuel Sandler, and Howard Stein offered editorial advice. Our thanks to them all.
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Riviere, P. n.d. Changing shapes and directions: The decade ahead. Unpublished manuscript.
Schrempp, G. 1983. The re-education of Friedrich Max Muller: Intellectual appropria tion and epistemological antinomy in mid-Victorian evolutionary thought. Man 18:90-110.
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