This article reassesses the distinctiveness and vitality of anthropology at a time when many disciplines study society or culture and quite a few have embraced ethnography and \ufb01eldwork. The distinctiveness of anthropology is not therefore implied simply by a particular object of study (society or culture) or by a particular method (\ufb01eldwork). Recently, Wendy James (2003) has published an outstanding synthesis of the richly facetted anthropological tradition andthe current challenges. What I seek to addto her portrait is an explicit argument about the distinctiveness of anthropology deriving from a particular wayof relatingto the object that infuses the resulting knowledge, andto sug- gest a new and invigorated \u2018turn\u2019. By tracingthe development of anthropology through previous turns, the article makes a case for the pertinence of the anthropological \ufb01eld, owing to its power at bringing ethnography and epistemology into coincident view.

The present moment in European social anthropology is replete with promise, at least if we look at its potential contribution to knowledge of social worlds andprocesses. If the times also cause anguish for the profession, politically and economically, it is all the more important to remind oneself of the strength and necessity of anthropology persisting in its quest to produce knowledge of the everyday, of the lives of ordinary people across the globe, of social forms and of the relationship between individual action and the larger history. In this paper, my focus is mainly on European social anthropology, as developed in a Durkheimian tradition, rather than the Boasian cultural anthropology of the United States, even though there has been a remarkable convergence of interests over the past decades (as will be apparent from my references in the following pages). More than anything, the Durkheimian legacy resides in the awareness of humans as social to the core. With it goes a wholeness of vision that allows for a comprehensive analysis of social forms, individual actions, collective beliefs, material restraints and creative expressions. Thus even culture is a social fact; the point is that there cannot be a \u2018non-social\u2019 anthropology, a human science which sets aside the kind of sociality \u2018we \ufb01nd celebrated in the humanities, in poetry, religion or music\u2019, to quote Wendy James (2003:301).

Around 1980 anthropologists in general became wary of grand narratives seeking to analyse social systems and cultural wholes; to be on the safe side they reported on global complexity and fragmented everyday lives. In the wake of the vital debate on representation, many anthropologists in Europe and elsewhere lost sight of the theoretical ambition to understand the world in terms that parted company from the

This article was \ufb01rst prepared for the symposium \u2018Facing \ufb01eldwork. Challenges for anthropology in a globalising world\u2019 organised by the WDO in Leiden in December 2003. The contributions of the organisers, co-speakers and audience are gratefully acknowledged. In particular I wish to thank the appointed discussant (now the editor ofSocial Anthropology), Peter Pels, for thoughtful and pertinent comments that helped me clarify issues for the printed version of my talk.

terms in which the different worlds portrayed themselves, though without losing sight of the latter. Some abandoned the idea of a uni\ufb01ed discipline altogether. In 1996, Henrietta Moore, for instance, claimed that anthropology no longer existed as a discipline; what we had was only a multiplicityof practices (Moore 1996:1). I would like to contest this. While one cannot but agree that anthropology consists of a multiplicity of practices, it does not followthat anthropology is no longer a distinct discipline. The wholeness of vision alluded to above is something that anthropologists share, as well as basic acknowledgement of the core sociality of humans (see also James 2003:298).

My ambition here is to contribute to the present explication of social anthropology as one discipline, inclusive of a multiplicity of practices by which the whole is both realised and subtly changed. It is not a matter of launching a new \u2018school\u2019 with a coherent set of theories but of acknowledging the fact that the worlds in which anthropologists are engaged always leave their own mark upon analysis and theory, and vice versa. Anthropology is fundamentallyre\ufb02exive in that sense, and so obviously \u2018historical\u2019. In order properly to assess the implications of this re\ufb02exivity we shall \ufb01rst retrace some of the steps taken by anthropology in the previous century in order to tease out both continuities and new turns in anthropological awareness. This serves as a necessary background to the identi\ufb01cation of current challenges.

As a distinct academic discipline, anthropology is largely a product of the twentieth century, even though it had forerunners such as evolutionism and diffusionism. This means that anthropology is a predominantly modern discipline that somewhat ironicallytook it upon itself to understandthe disappearing non-modern world. Renato Rosaldo has suggestedthat western anthropologywas driven by an imperialist nostalgia \u2013 a mourning of what the west had itself destroyed (Rosaldo 1989:68ff.). Although the development of the discipline was, of course, gradual and far from uni\ufb01ed, it is possible to identify a series of major breaks, indicating shifts of \u2018exemplars\u2019, in the sense suggestedby Kuhn in his discussion of paradigms (Kuhn 1969:198ff.). Looking back on modernism, Edwin Ardener suggests the following map of the development of British anthropology:

The named classical theories in this model are all \u2018grand narratives\u2019 and symptoms of the modernist ambition to explain everything social or cultural by reference to one comprehensive scheme. The explanations have different exemplars, and in my view Ardener\u2019s model neatly indicates when and where the major shifts occurred; new genres of writing emerged at these points that we may identify as these newturns in anthropology. Looking \ufb01rst at functionalism and structural functionalism, we can see both as expressions of a biological turn making an impact (foreshadowedby Durkheim) from the mid-twenties onwards. For Malinowski, biology entered his theoretical thinking through being the primary cause of culture \u2013 the latter seen as instrumental in ful\ufb01lling the primary biological needs and derived, secondary social needs of humans. For Radcliffe-Brown, biology had a more stringent status as exemplary science; he suggested that society was akin to a biological organism, and that anthropologists should set out to identifythe natural laws of societyby addressing both the morphology (social structure) and the physiology (social processes) of concrete societies.

The biological turn in European anthropology was part of a larger trend between the wars that sought to unify scholarship in the image of the natural sciences, andbase it on rigorous positivism. This trend also pervadedthe \ufb01eld of linguistics, fuellingthe idea of language as an objective phenomenon existing independently of the spoken word. Already in 1916, Ferdinand de Saussure had suggested a distinction between \u2018langue\u2019 and \u2018parole\u2019 that was to take root and develop into a very fertile period in general linguistics inEurope. Without going into detail, it will be generally acknowledged that because of this development, linguistics became the paradigmatic discipline among the human sciences (including anthropology). If we accept Ardener\u2019s scheme, the linguistic turn \ufb01nally displaced the biological with the advent of structuralism around 1960. The 1960s were generally a time of major metamorphosis in anthropology, owing to the demise of colonialism and the end of \u2018tribal ethnography\u2019 (Leach 1989).

The linguistic turn had pervaded Dutch anthropology earlier than that, notably in the work of De Josselin de Jong, but if we stick to Ardener\u2019s depiction of the grand modernist narratives, structuralism is mainly associated with British social anthropology leaping de\ufb01nitively from function to meaning (as proclaimed earlier by Evans-Pritchard). In my own view, structuralism in the French version is probably the grandest of all grand modernist narratives, because it potentially embraces all of human history and thinking, and because L\u00b4

evi-Strauss is a master narrator. His oeuvre is the most comprehensive example of the linguistic turn, more or less explicitly stated as such in a programmatic article from 1952 in which he declared that language and culture are manifestations of similar logical operations (L\u00b4

evi-Strauss 1967:67). If French structuralism can be seen as the pinnacle of modernism in anthropology, it also contributed to the gradual undermining of the rationalist legacy including one of the basic premises of modernism, i.e. that the world can be known as it really is. Instead, it became implicitly clear that the world could only be known as something else, for instance a language or a structure. The point is that the complexity of the world de\ufb01es clarity of description except by way of some sort of model or theory. The terminology and metaphors, in short the \u2018turn\u2019 of any science fashions the theoretical possibilities and directs the attention towards some phenomena rather than others. In this sense, we might see structuralism as a precursor of the idea that cultures are not objectively existing entities out there but have merely been written by anthropologists. When this was \ufb01nally articulated \u2013 not least by American anthropologists such as Clifford and Marcus (1986) \u2013 postmodernism andthe debate on representation were well under way.