Anthropology - Scope of The Discipline - Adam Kuper PDF

Anthropology: Scope of the Discipline
ADAM KUPER
London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom
The modern project of anthropology took shape in the 1860s. A protean field, respon-
sive to the politics of empire and postimperialism and susceptible to the seduction of
intellectual fashions, anthropology has adopted a variety of research programs. There
are also marked differences between national traditions of anthropology. Yet, for much
of the history of the discipline, anthropologists never quite gave up on a great, shared
ambition: to identify the common features of the human species and to chart and
explain the range of variation in human biology, social organization, language, beliefs,
and values.
Anthropology is the only academic field that addresses the whole range of human
variation, but in practice it developed specialist tracks, the “four fields” as they were
often termed—cultural and social anthropology, biological anthropology, “prehistoric”
archaeology, and linguistics. In Europe the subdisciplines separated in the early twenti-
eth century, while American anthropology departments tried to sustain a conversation
between the four fields but with diminishing success. Each track developed distinctive
research programs and turned for inspiration to other disciplines. Biological anthro-
pologists were natural scientists. Social anthropologists were social scientists. Cultural
anthropologists felt more at home in the humanities and tended to borrow ideas from
philosophy, literary theory, and history. Linguistics and, though less completely, archae-
ology, became autonomous disciplines. For the most part, specialists in these different
fields ignored each other, more or less politely, but in the late twentieth century a bio-
logical party and a cultural party engaged in rancorous competition for control of the
intellectual agenda.
Origins
The word “anthropology” has been traced back to the sixteenth century. Ethnologie
and Völkerkunde were eighteenth-century German coinages (Vermeulen 2015). These
terms were sometimes treated as synonyms, but by the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury “anthropology” usually referred to racial studies. Indeed, the definition of human
“races” was a foundational move of the emergent field of inquiry. Ethnology was asso-
ciated rather with studies of Kultur (another eighteenth-century German neologism).
Between 1839 and 1869 learned societies dedicated to anthropology or ethnology were
established in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York. European museums of natural his-
tory developed specialized ethnographic sections. In 1879 the US Congress established
the Bureau of Ethnology (later the Bureau of American Ethnology), which assembled
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1591
2 A N T H R O P O L O G Y: S CO P E OF THE D I S CI P L I N E
collections of Native American artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

DC, and instituted a program of research.
The pioneer ethnologists and anthropologists claimed a distinctive subject matter:
those peoples—termed savages, barbarians, or primitives—who lacked writing, laws,
commerce and industry, temples, courts and cities, perhaps even families. Scholars
could draw on investigations of human fossil remains, the finds of archaeology, and
“ethnography” (by which was meant reports on the languages, arts, mythology, and
customs of surviving “primitive” peoples). The first aim was to reconstruct the most
ancient ways of life and the second to discover the paths that led from savagery to
the higher stages of barbarism, in a few cases eventually reaching the very peaks of
civilization.
The term “civilization” was another (originally French) eighteenth-century coinage.
In the eighteenth century European scholars began systematic studies of the religions,
literature, and art of China, Japan, India, ancient Egypt, and the Islamic world. Adapting
the methods of classical and biblical studies, they situated what were now called the
civilizations of the Orient alongside ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome. The period before
the rise of civilization was the age of “prehistory,” a term that was coined in 1836 to refer
to pre-Roman Britain and which gained currency with the publication in 1865 of John
Lubbock’s Pre-historic Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains.
As geologists began to reveal the great age of the earth, it became apparent that human
prehistory stretched back into the remote past. Excavations in Continental Europe and,
in 1858, at Brixham Cave in England revealed human remains and artifacts in ancient
geological formations and in association with the fossils of extinct animal species. In
1859 Darwin’s mentor, the great geologist Charles Lyell, announced to a major scientific
gathering that it was “probable that man was old enough to have co-existed, at least, with
the Siberian mammoth,” and in 1863 he published a cautious synthesis of the emerging
perspective, his Antiquity of Man. In the same year Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to
Man’s Place in Nature drew attention to the anatomical similarities between humans and
apes, clear indications of a common ancestry. Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) proposed
that the earliest human beings must have lived rather like African apes, although they
were bipedal, had larger brains, and made tools. “The great antiquity of mankind upon
the earth has been conclusively established,” wrote Lewis H. Morgan in the introduction
to his Ancient Society in 1877 (xxix): “It seems singular that the proofs should have been
discovered as recently as within the last thirty years, and that the present generation
should be the first called upon to recognize so important a fact.”
The doctrine of progress and the “evolutionists”
Victorian Britain was the most dynamic center of the new anthropology. Darwin’s
Origin of Species (1859, 488) was a great stimulus, with its tantalizing promise
that, following the recognition of natural selection, “light will be thrown on the
origin of man and his history.” Yet, while Darwin’s theories added authority and
excitement to their debates, the anthropologists and ethnologists drew on an earlier
tradition, the secular universal histories of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
A N T H R O P O L O G Y: S CO P E OF THE D I S CI P L I N E 3
These sketched a progression, paced by the development of reason, from an original

state of savagery through barbarism to civilization. Advances in knowledge led to
technological progress. Economies progressed from hunting to pastoralism and then
on to agriculture, commerce and markets, and finally industrialization.
The philosopher Herbert Spencer (1862) revived this tradition of thought, but gave
it a biological gloss. Spencer was heavily influenced by the evolutionary theory of a
French biologist, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829), who had proposed that all
species have an innate will to progress. As they march onward and upward they become
increasingly complex and efficient. Leading scientists rejected Lamarck’s doctrine. Dar-
win was scathing, writing in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in January 1844: “Heaven
forfend me from Lamarck’s nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression’ ‘adaptations from
the slow willing of animals’ &c” (Darwin 1844). But Spencer endorsed Lamarck’s the-
ory and applied it to the history of human society. Societies were like living beings.
Progress—and what Spencer termed “evolution”—characterized the development of
all forms of life. The very same laws explained the progress, or evolution, of biological
organisms, natural species, and also human societies.
There were fierce debates between rival schools, particularly about race and hence
about slavery, a matter of passionate interest as the Civil War broke out in the United
States. Leading members of the Anthropological Society of London argued that the
human races had separate origins and differed fundamentally in ability and character,
and its members were inclined to justify slavery. The members of the mainstream Lon-
don Ethnological Society, heirs to the antislavery Aboriginal Protection Society, readily
accepted Darwin’s thesis that all forms of life are related genealogically, that all human
beings descended from the same ancestors.
But even many of the ethnologicals were not strict Darwinians. According to Darwin,
the mechanism of evolution was natural selection. Competition for resources and envi-
ronmental pressures stimulated local, temporary adaptations. Mutations that give an
advantage tend to spread within a population. Damaging mutations are gradually bred
out. Since challenges and opportunities are unpredictable and mutations are random
events, the direction of change within a population is uncertain. Darwin noted in the
Origin of Species, “I believe in no fixed law of development, causing all the inhabitants
of a country to change abruptly, or simultaneously, or to an equal degree” (1859, 314).
But Darwin’s lesson was not learned. Most British ethnologists preferred Spencer’s doc-
trine that developments—or advances—follow “a general formula, or law of evolution”
(Marett 1911, 9).
Yet Darwin also argued that the force of natural selection was lessened as human
beings evolved. Most human capacities, even empathy and concern for others, were
inherited, with modifications, from social animals. But people adapted to climate
by building shelters and making fires, cooked their food, defended themselves with
weapons, and cared for the ill and handicapped. Long before they domesticated plants
and animals, humans had begun to domesticate themselves. Culture became second
nature to them.
For the father of British ethnology, Edward Burnett Tylor, the distinctive human
endowment was an inherited stock of language, technique, and knowledge. He called
this “Culture, or Civilisation,” defined more precisely as “that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871, 1:1). And Tylor insisted
that all peoples have some degree of culture. Some are more primitive and others more
advanced, but all cultures everywhere develop along the same progressive trajectory.
The label “evolutionist anthropology” has been used retrospectively to describe the
central theory of Tylor and his school, but Tylor’s evolutionism was that of Spencer
rather than of Darwin. It dealt with “progress” rather than with adaptation and selection
in specific local conditions. “Evolutionist” anthropologists assumed that there was a
single history of culture or civilization—that all societies progressed through the same
stages. At each stage the beliefs and customs of societies at a similar level of development
are essentially the same. Some populations, however, were apparently stuck at an early
stage of development. Contemporary “primitive societies” could therefore be treated as
stand-ins for past societies at an equivalent stage of development.
On this premise, evolutionist anthropologists developed what they called the “com-
parative method.” When it came to religion, for instance, the notions of the Ameri-
can Indians, perhaps, or at a higher level, the Tahitians, provided living instances of
conceptions and beliefs that had once been widespread. Captain Cook had introduced
the word “taboo” from Tahiti. Soon taboos were being discovered all over the place.
Other exotic terms were soon taken up—mana, another Polynesian word, totem from
the Ojibwa, and voodoo from West Africa. All were taken to represent different stages
in the evolution of religion. Since they assumed that societies at the same stage of evo-
lution had similar religions, Victorian anthropologists wrote about Australian totems
and American Indian taboos. They even identified totems and taboos in ancient Israel.
Primitive beliefs in magic, taboo, totems, or ancestor spirits seemed irrational to the
Victorians. Anthropologists supposed that there was something about their ways of
thinking that led primitive people to make mistakes of perception and logic. After all,
Darwin and Huxley were proposing that the pace of human evolution was determined
by the development of the brain. It was widely assumed that the brains of the various
races developed at different rates and that the smaller-brained savages, and indeed the
early Israelites, had not been capable of thinking very clearly.
Tylor suggested that the very earliest religion arose from a misapprehension: peo-
ple everywhere have dreams and visions but primitive people confused dreams with
real experiences. They dreamed of dead relatives and concluded that the spirits of the
deceased continued to live in another world. They then generalized this conclusion.
Trees, plants, and even planets have immortal souls that must be fed and placated by sac-
rifices. Tylor termed this “animism.” Vestiges of the primitive cult − which Tylor called
“survivals”—could be traced in the ceremonies of the most advanced religions.
The evolutionists believed that even the great world civilizations had emerged from
an original primitive condition. Deploying the comparative method, drawing on
reports of “primitive societies,” identifying “survivals” of even more ancient customs,
W. Robertson Smith (1885, 1889) speculated about the development of society and
religion in ancient Israel and Arabia. He concluded that societies in the region had
advanced from an original matrilineal condition, associated with totemism, to a
system of extended patriarchal families with ancestor cults. Eventually kingdoms
emerged, with state religions. Everywhere the most important ritual was sacrifice, but
while the rite remained stable its meaning changed as religious beliefs became more
sophisticated. Sacrifices of the totem gave way to communion meals between the living
and their ancestors and finally to offerings to a national god.
A bestseller in the new anthropology was James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first
published in 1890. Following up Smith’s speculations about the sacrifice of a totemic
god, Frazer constructed an ethnological detective story. It began with the ritual stran-
gling of “the King of the Wood,” the priest of the sanctuary of Nemi, near Rome. This
sacred king was the embodiment of a tree spirit. He was not simply murdered but was
sacrificed to ensure the fertility of nature. Clues drawn from a vast range of ethno-
graphic sources showed that primitive people identified their wellbeing with the fate of
natural spirits. Their priest-kings were sacrificed in fertility rituals. “The result, then,
of our inquiry is to make it probable that … the King of the Wood lived and died as
an incarnation of the Supreme Aryan god, whose life was in the mistletoe or Golden
Bough” (Frazer 1890, 2:363). The conclusion, left implicit, was that even Christianity
was simply a more refined version of a primitive totemic cult, sharing a central belief in
the saving sacrifice of a priest-king.
In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim
([1912] 1915) argued that religions were so widespread that they could not be dismissed
as a muddle of fantastic mythology and misguided philosophy. Religion was clearly
essential to society. Its social function had to be understood. Durkheim adopted Smith’s
thesis that religion was rooted in social arrangements and that early religions developed
out of family cults. Among the aboriginal peoples of Australia—which Durkheim, like
Frazer, took to be the most primitive surviving society—the exogamous kinship group,
the clan, was associated with an emblem, the totem, which was the object of taboos
and sacrifice. It was set apart, sacred. This demarcation of a sacred sphere, ringed by
taboos, was the origin of all religions, but each religion was adapted to the structure of
a particular society, which it sanctified.
Smith and Durkheim also drew on a second foundational research program of
anthropology. This addressed the rise of marriage and the family. John F. McLennan
(1865) had proposed a model of the earliest societies. Nomadic bands of marauders
practiced female infanticide and marriage by capture. Captive women belonged
collectively to all the men in the band. Since paternity could not be established, the
only recognized blood ties were between mothers and their sons. Each band believed
that it was descended matrilineally from a particular natural species, its totem, which
was worshiped as an ancestor god and placated with rituals. Totemism was conceived
of therefore as being at once a religion and a social system. As a social institution it was
characterized by matrilineal descent and strict rules of exogamy.
Lewis H. Morgan (1877), the first major theorist in American anthropology, sys-
tematized these speculations on the course of social evolution. The earliest societies
were little more than kinship groups. After an initial period of promiscuity, marriages
united a set of brothers with a set of sisters. At first only descent from a mother was
recognized. Relationships traced through males became more significant as economies
became more productive and men began to accumulate property. The family was there-
fore a late development. Eventually a second great revolution in human affairs occurred:
political groups came to be based on territory rather than on kinship and descent.
Barbarians had kings, laws, armies, state religions, and national territories. These insti-
tutions would eventually evolve into the civilized arrangements of modern societies.
Morgan’s synthetic account of social evolution was widely influential. It shaped
the early research program of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Less predictably,
it became part of the doctrine of Marxism. Karl Marx’s associate Friedrich Engels
pronounced that Morgan’s “discovery … has the same importance for anthropology
as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for
political economy” (Engels 1884, preface). In communist Russia and China, Morgan’s
theory was to become the orthodox framework for all anthropological work.
Geography, folklore, and diffusionism: The German school
Another intellectual tradition was inspired by the very different proto-Romantic or

“counter-Enlightenment” ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). Herder
introduced the notion of Kultur to describe a distinctive, local way of apprehending
and dealing with the world. A culture was a system of values and ideas that found its
fullest expression in language, folktales, music, and crafts. Each Volk drew its particular
spiritual character from its culture. Following Herder, German ethnologists generally
rejected the Enlightenment view that there was a single evolutionary history of human
culture, that culture progressed through a series of set stages to the pinnacle of civiliza-
tion. A more relativist perspective was articulated. There was no hierarchy of cultures.
No culture or civilization could claim to suit everyone everywhere. To each Volk its own
Kultur. This conception inspired nationalistic accounts of the supposedly authentic folk
cultures of Central European peoples.
The most influential German school of ethnology and anthropology emerged in
Berlin in the 1870s, under the leadership of the anatomist Rudolf Virchow and the
ethnologist Adolf Bastian. Virchow was a critic of Darwin, whose synthesis he thought
premature, and he denounced the racial theory of human difference expounded by
Germany’s best-known Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel. According to Haeckel, the human
races had become virtually distinct species. Virchow countered that human races were
unstable, their boundaries permeable and shifting, and that racial mixing was normal.
For Virchow, biological traits, such as blood groups, cut across racial categories and
he dismissed the notion that race and culture were necessarily associated. On the
contrary, race and culture varied independently.
In 1869 Virchow and Bastian established the Berlin Society for Anthropology,
Ethnology and Prehistory. Bastian directed the Royal Museum of Völkerkunde and
occupied the chair of ethnology at the University of Berlin. He advanced a theory of
culture that had much in common with Virchow’s approach to race: just as there were
no pure races, so there were no pure cultures. For Bastian, contact between peoples
led to intermarriage and to the diffusion of ideas, techniques, and institutions. Like
races, cultures were historically contingent, the unstable products of a local history of
exchanges and interactions.
In the German universities the discipline of ethnology developed in close association
with geography. Some ethnologists and geographers took the view that local cultures
and racial types were shaped, perhaps even determined, by the natural environment. A
rival school insisted, rather, on the importance of the migrations of peoples and the dif-
fusion of ideas and techniques. Bastian advanced a compromise position, suggesting
that while migration and diffusion were the main causes of culture change ecologi-
cal constraints were important in shaping “geographical provinces,” regions with dis-
tinctive geographical characteristics in which different populations interacted. Bastian
also advocated a tempered cultural relativism, based on the supposed psychic unity of
mankind. Despite cultural variation, all human populations shared fundamental ideas,
the Elementargedanken.
Franz Boas, American anthropology, and the spread

of diffusionism
In the early twentieth century the German ethnological tradition, with its con-
cern for local historical processes and its focus on migrations and the diffusion of
techniques, customs, and myths, presented a direct challenge to the evolutionism of
the Anglo-American school, which assumed that all societies passed through the same
stages of development. Leading British anthropologists, among them W. H. R. Rivers,
Grafton Elliot Smith, and Charles G. Seligman, were converted to the diffusionist
approach. In the United States, Franz Boas, a student of Virchow and Bastian, mounted
a successful challenge to the evolutionist research program of Lewis H. Morgan, which
had been adopted by the Bureau of American Ethnology.
In 1885 Boas spent a year on Baffin Island, collecting material on the migration routes
of the Inuit. He went into the field an environmental determinist but came to the con-
clusion that “the phenomena such as customs, traditions and migrations are far too
complex in their origin, to enable us to study their psychological causes without a thor-
ough knowledge of their history” (Stocking 1974, 60). In 1886 he made the first of a
series of expeditions to the Kwakiutl and neighboring peoples in British Columbia,
with the aim of reconstructing the cultural history of the region. His publications on
Kwakiutl ethnography eventually ran to over 5,000 pages, filled with texts (in the vernac-
ular with literal translations) that Boas and his local assistant collected from informants
recounting myths and describing rituals and customs.
In 1899 Boas was appointed a full professor at Columbia University. His seminar was
for many years the main school for professional anthropologists in the United States.
His students included virtually all the leading figures of the next generation—Alfred
L. Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, Melville Herskovits, Alexander
Goldenweiser, and, in the 1920s, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. They were
expected to combine research in anatomy, linguistics, folklore, material culture, and
social organization and to establish the historical relations between local clusters of abo-
riginal peoples across North America. There were vast gaps in North American Indian
ethnography. The Boasians were, moreover, generally unimpressed with the existing
studies, in particular those written under the influence of Morgan’s evolutionist theory.
The Boasians also had a theoretical agenda. Following the example of Virchow,
Boas developed a critique of racist thinking. He insisted that there was no necessary
connection between race, culture, and language. And, following Bastian’s example,
Boas and his students criticized the reigning “evolutionist” theories. Local histories did
not fit into any universal schema. It was not true that the family, based on marriage,
had emerged at a late stage of human development. After all, families were to be found
in the simplest hunter-gatherer societies. Matrilineal societies were not necessarily less
advanced than patrilineal societies, and there was no basis for the assumption that
patriliny always succeeded matriliny. “Totemism” was a shaky construct: clans could
be found without totems, totems existed in the absence of clans, and clans might or
might not be exogamous. By 1920, after two decades of organized research, the Boasian
critique of evolutionist anthropology had been accomplished and a new paradigm
established in American anthropology.
“Cultures develop mainly through the borrowings due to chance contact,” Robert
Lowie wrote, explaining the basic principles of Boas’s theory. That “planless hodge-
podge, that thing of shreds and patches, called civilization,” did not form an organic
whole, as the followers of Herder had imagined. Nor were there any laws of social
development (Lowie 1920, 440–41). Yet, if the Boasian critique was compelling,
there was a sense, even within the camp, that the message was perhaps too austere.
Reviewing Lowie’s Primitive Society in the American Anthropologist, another leading
Boasian, Alfred L. Kroeber, remarked: “As long as we continue offering the world only
constructions of specific detail, and consistently show a negativistic attitude towards
broader conclusions, the world will find very little of profit in ethnology. People do
want to know why” (1920, 380)
Ethnographic ﬁeldwork
The evolutionists relied on ethnographic data provided by missionaries, explorers, and

colonial officers. Morgan and Frazer sent out questionnaires to “men in the field,” and
amateur ethnographers could follow the guidelines laid down by metropolitan scholars
in the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology, an extended
questionnaire that went through four editions between 1870 and 1920. These question-
naires yielded some enduring ethnographies, such as Spencer and Gillen’s monograph
The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904) and Henri Junod’s (1912) account of the
Thonga of Mozambique. But the bulk of ethnographic reportage was clearly unreliable.
There was an urgent need for improvement, above all because “primitives societies”
were apparently abandoning the old ways of life. “In many parts of the world,” Rivers
wrote in 1913, “the death of every old man brings with it the loss of knowledge never
to be replaced” (Rivers 1913, 6).
As anthropology established itself in the universities in Germany in the 1870s and in
Britain and the United States in the early twentieth century, trained scientists began to
carry out field studies. Museums funded expeditions to gather artifacts, document local
customs, and map the distribution of beliefs, institutions, and technologies. Yet these
fieldwork expeditions, often carried out in teams, usually lasted only a few weeks, and,
while professional ethnographers might pride themselves on their rigorous methods,
they had to rely on interpreters. Even the best of the ethnographers, like Franz Boas,
depended on formal accounts provided by informants, but they believed that they had
no choice. Many of the practices that Boas observed were often obviously compromised
by borrowings from Europeans. In his view, however, the primary aim of the ethnogra-
phers was to reconstruct the local culture as it had existed before the arrival of colonists.
He therefore had to rely on reports of past practices rather than on direct observation.
Surveys of large areas were a priority, but there was also a demand for detailed stud-
ies of particular societies. In 1913 the leading ethnologist at Cambridge University,
W. H. R. Rivers called for more “intensive work”:
A typical piece of intensive work is one in which the worker lives for a year or more
among a community of perhaps four or five hundred people and studies every detail
of their life and culture; in which he comes to know every member of the community
personally; in which he is not content with generalized information, but studies every
feature of life and custom in concrete detail and by means of the vernacular language.
(Rivers 1913, 7)
Rivers’s counterpart at Oxford, R. R. Marett, added that intensive research would

show how “even where the regime of custom is most absolute, the individual constantly
adapts himself to its injunctions, or rather adapts these to his own purposes” (cited in
Wallis 1957, 790).
Malinowski and “functionalism”
The outstanding exponent of “intensive” fieldwork was Bronisław Malinowski. A young

Polish anthropologist, Malinowski had studied economic history with Karl Bücher
and experimental psychology with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany. Both these
distinguished professors were interested in ethnology: Bücher lectured on “primitive”
economic systems and their systems of gift exchange, while the two volumes of Wundt’s
Völkerpsychologie, published in 1904, reviewed a range of ethnographic information.
Unlike the individualist psychologies of the day, Wundt’s “folk psychology” dealt with
what he called Kultur, “those mental products which are created by a community of
human life and are, therefore, inexplicable in terms merely of individual consciousness,
since they presuppose the reciprocal action of many” (Wundt [1904] 1923, 3). Wundt
also insisted that the development of language, myth, or religion could not be treated
in isolation. This was because “the various mental expressions, particularly in their
early stages, are so intertwined that they are scarcely separable from one another.
Language is influenced by myth, art is a factor in myth development, and customs
and usages are everywhere sustained by mythological conceptions” (Wundt [1904]
1923, 5) He preferred to take “transverse instead of longitudinal sections,” treating the
relationships between customs and institutions as they operate together. All these ideas
were later incorporated into Durkheim’s notion of the “collective consciousness” and
Malinowski’s “functionalism.”
In 1910 Malinowski went to the London School of Economics (LSE), where he wrote
a doctoral dissertation on the Australian family, influenced by Edvard Westermarck, a
Darwinian who challenged the reigning “evolutionist” account of the human family and
argued that the family was universal. Charles G. Seligman, professor of ethnology at the
LSE, then encouraged Malinowski to undertake fieldwork and guided him to Melanesia.
Malinowski began his ethnographic research in Papua in 1914, but despite spending
several months in the field he depended on interpreters and his interviews followed the
guidelines laid down in Notes and Queries on Anthropology. Moving on to a more ambi-
tious study in the Trobriand Islands in 1915, he decided that the ethnographer should
“live without other white men, right among the natives,” relinquish his “comfortable
position on the veranda,” learn the vernacular language, and join in the daily life of
the community (Malinowski 1922, 6). In short, the ethnographer had to become a par-
ticipant observer. Moreover, it was not enough to fill out the checklist of customs and
beliefs in Notes and Queries on Anthropology. Institutions and customs work together,
meshing to accomplish their necessary tasks. And it is their operation that matters, not
their formal design. The ethnographer should move beyond the description of formal
rules, official beliefs, and stereotyped customs and tackle “the imponderabilia of actual
life and everyday behavior.” The ultimate goal “of which an Ethnographer should never
lose sight,” Malinowski wrote, was “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to
life, to realize his vision of his world” (1922, 25).
Each of Malinowski’s Trobriand monographs, published between 1922 and 1936,
focused on a particular complex of institutions—exchange relationships, dispute
resolution, sexual life and the family, gardening and magic. In each study Malinowski
brought out the ways in which the Trobrianders manipulated the formal rules in order
to gain personal advantage: “Whenever the native can evade his obligations without
loss of prestige, he does so, exactly as a civilized businessman would do” (Malinowski
1926, 30). Indeed, “in his relation to nature and destiny,” Malinowski wrote, “whether
he tries to exploit the first or to dodge the second, primitive man recognizes both the
natural and the supernatural forces and agencies, and he tries to use them both for his
benefit” (1948, 42).
So the Trobriander was a rational actor. There was a pragmatic logic to the institutions
of “savages” (a term that Malinowski, rather like Montaigne, used ironically). Customs
would not survive unless they had a utilitarian purpose. The bottom line was that “sav-
ages” were very like everyone else, even ourselves. Malinowski once remarked that when
he started out as an anthropologist the emphasis had been on the differences between
peoples: “I recognised their study as important, but underlying sameness I thought of
greater importance and rather neglected” (cited by Young 2004, 76).
Returning to a post at the LSE in 1924, Malinowski inaugurated a famous seminar,
which ran until 1938. As late as 1939, there were only some twenty professional social
anthropologists in the British Commonwealth, and almost all had been regular partic-
ipants in the LSE seminar. Here the next cohort of social anthropologists was inducted
into what Malinowski began to call “functionalism.” The essential doctrine was that
customs and institutions should be analyzed without recourse to (often speculative) his-
torical explanations. What mattered was how institutions related to other institutions,
how they worked, and who benefited from them.
This shift from historical to functional frameworks of explanation was a common
feature of the social sciences in the 1920s, as social scientists were drawn into policy
planning. Economies, societies, or cultures were understood as integrated systems in a
state of equilibrium. A historian of social science, Dorothy Ross, points to “a movement

toward modernist historical consciousness, the growing power of professional speciali-
sation, and the sharpening conception of scientific method,” which together produced a
“slow paradigm shift in the social sciences … away from historico- evolutionary mod-
els … to specialised sciences focused on short-term processes” (2003, 388).
In the United States the younger Boasians—Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Mar-
garet Mead—began to argue (as Sapir wrote in a pathbreaking essay) that an authentic
culture gives “a particular people its distinctive place in the world … large groups of
people everywhere tend to think and act in accordance with all but instinctive forms,
which are in large measure peculiar to it” (Sapir 1924, 405). This implied a decisive
break with the historical anthropology of Boas.
For Benedict and Mead the central issue was the way in which “culture” shaped “per-
sonality.” According to Benedict, each culture had a distinctive psychological identity
and the personality of the young was shaped to fit its emotional bias. Early conditioning
was the crux: “The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommoda-
tion to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community … By
the time he can talk, [the child] is the little creature of his culture” (Benedict 1934, 3).
Margaret Mead developed this premise in a series of ethnographic studies of personality
formation in the South Pacific.
In Britain, Malinowski and his rival, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, agreed that the dif-
fusionists and evolutionists were both on the wrong track. It was not the past that
mattered but the present. “I believe that at this time the really important conflict in
anthropological studies is not that between the ‘evolutionists’ and the ‘diffusionists,’
nor between the various schools of the ‘diffusionists,’” Radcliffe-Brown remarked, “but
between conjectural history on the one side and the functional study of society on the
other” (1929, 53). However, in contrast to their American contemporaries, who were
exploring the process of personality formation, the British were concerned with the
mesh of social institutions.
Radcliffe-Brown was the first student of Rivers to undertake a solo ethnographic field
study (in 1906). He started off as a diffusionist but was an early convert to the doctrines
of Durkheim, the first major sociologist to pay detailed attention to the new wave of
ethnographic materials and anthropological debates. Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown
were also influenced by Herbert Spencer. Following Spencer, Radcliffe-Brown favored
an organic analogy. The parts of a society—the groupings, the institutions, the beliefs,
the customs—work together to sustain the whole, just as each bodily organ plays a nec-
essary part in maintaining life.
In the view of the Durkheimians, the individual is coerced, or persuaded, to fit in,
to perform a prescribed role in society. Religious beliefs sustain the values of the social
order. Collective rituals whip up emotional commitment to the group and its values. The
enduring essence of religion was exemplified for Durkheim by Australian totemism,
which provided the central case study in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
([1912] 1915). Radcliffe-Brown, who was beginning his own fieldwork in Australia,
adopted Durkheim’s approach, although he dissented from the latter’s use of the Aus-
tralian data.
In the 1920s and 1930s Radcliffe-Brown worked in parallel with Durkheim’s nephew
and most prominent disciple, Marcel Mauss, to develop a sociological anthropology.
Radcliffe-Brown’s particular interest was in kinship systems, which he took to be
the foundation of primitive social structures. In an enduring classic of Durkheimian
analysis, the Essay on the Gift ([1924] 1990), Mauss reanalyzed Malinowski’s and
Boas’s accounts of exchange in Melanesia and on the northwest Atlantic coast. Their
Durkheimian approach was collectivist. Malinowski’s inclination was toward a more
individualistic understanding of social action. Nevertheless Radcliffe-Brown, Mauss,
and Malinowski agreed on a basic premise, that social institutions and rituals work
together to sustain the way of life of a community.
Audrey Richards, an early student of Malinowski, recalled that the participants in the
LSE seminar felt that they were engaged in a sort of game, the aim being to discover “the
necessity of the custom or institution under discussion to the individual, the group or
the society.” If the Trobriand islanders did it, or had it, it must be assumed to be a neces-
sary thing for them to do or to have. Thus their sorcery, condemned by the missionary
and the administrator, was shown to be a conservative force supporting their political
and legal system. Prenuptial license, also frowned upon by Europeans, was described
as supporting marriage institutions and allowing for sex selection. The couvade was no
longer a laughable eccentricity but a social mechanism for the public assumption of the
father’s duties toward the child (Richards 1957, 19).
Malinowski had a second, methodological, agenda. This was the doctrine of partici-
pant observation. Ethnographic research had to be long term and conducted in vernac-
ular languages. It should focus on what people were doing rather than what they said
they should be doing. This implied that much of the available ethnographic material
was unsatisfactory. However, there were limited funds for field research. Malinowski’s
early students generally based their dissertations on secondary sources, recasting ethno-
graphic reports on a region in a functionalist mode (as Malinowski himself had done
in his study of the family among the Australian Aborigines).
The comparative study of “tribal” societies
In 1931 Malinowski and the International African Institute launched a research fellow-
ship program funded by a Rockefeller family foundation. Seventeen of Malinowski’s
students were granted fellowships over the next five years. As a condition of their grants,
they went to Africa rather than Melanesia or Australia, the main stamping grounds
of the older generation. But African societies were very different from those in which
Malinowski had done fieldwork. Ethnographers working in Africa were confronted not
with tiny, bounded populations but with extended, dispersed societies. Moreover, colo-
nial African societies had been profoundly affected by the system of indirect rule. British
colonial administrators divided African peoples into a series of bounded and monocul-
tural “tribes,” each ruled according to customary principles by a chief. This was a fiction,
and its imposition by administrative fiat required a good deal of social engineering that
was often crude and sometimes violent.
In any case, the world was changing and Africa with it. In 1930 Marcel Mauss noted
that what he termed a rational, universal, progressive, civilization was spreading irre-
sistibly. With the diffusion of science and new technologies like the cinema, the radio,
and the telephone “a new world civilization” was coming into being, which “penetrates
all forms of music, all accents, all words, all the news, despite all the barriers. We are
just at the beginning [of this process]” (Mauss 1930, 105–6; author’s translation). And
yet Malinowski’s students tended to describe supposedly traditional “tribes,” although
Malinowski did envisage studies of what he called “the changing native,” and some
research was undertaken on migrant labor and the sociology of towns.
Malinowski went in for broad-brush comparisons between “primitive” Melanesians
and “civilized” Europeans, though he used both terms ironically. However, not only
were African societies very different from the small aboriginal populations of Melane-
sia, Polynesia, and Australia but they were themselves very diverse. With his natural
science conception of anthropology, Radcliffe-Brown argued that a comparative soci-
ology of “tribal” societies was required. Tribal societies and their institutions should be
compared and classified into types and subtypes.
In 1936 Radcliffe-Brown was appointed to the Oxford chair in social anthropology,
where he was joined by E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes. Together they set out
to construct a comparative sociology of African “tribes.” A volume edited by Fortes
and Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems (1940), identified two types of African
polity: states and “stateless societies.” These stateless societies were not all alike. A few
marginal hunter-gatherer societies were little more than extended family groups, very
like the Australian bands as described Radcliffe-Brown. A larger class of stateless soci-
eties, sometimes encompassing hundreds of thousands of people, was organized into
corporate, segmentary clans and lineages which managed their affairs without power-
ful chiefs. According to Fortes, “all legal and political relations” in such societies “take
place in the context of the lineage system” (1953, 26). Prime examples were the Nuer of
the southern Sudan, studied by Evans-Pritchard, and the Tallensi of northern Ghana,
studied by Fortes.
Segmentary lineage systems were identified as a special case, one type of tribal struc-
ture, but it was assumed that all primitive societies were based on kinship ties. Two
extremely ambitious studies published in 1949 compared—in very different ways—the
kinship systems of all “tribal” societies. At Yale University George Peter Murdock (1949)
built up a world sample of “tribal” societies, deploying statistical tests to establish rela-
tionships between types of kinship terminology, rules of residence or inheritance, incest
regulations, and marriages with particular categories of kin. A French scholar, Claude
Lévi-Strauss ([1949] 1969), proposed that the incest taboo was the first law of all human
societies and that the core function of kinship systems was the exchange of women in
marriage. Exogamous clans were brought together in a broader social field by marriages
alliances that cross-cut the clans. The pattern of these alliances tended to be enduring
and repetitive (a man from group X always finding a wife in group Y, and giving a wife
to a man in Z, for example).
The African descent model and Lévi-Strauss’s “alliance” model were competitive
exercises in a comparative anthropology of “tribal” societies. More broadly considered,
they both exemplified the “equilibrium models” that were current in sociology and
economics. Societies could be treated as closed systems. Inputs and disturbances from
outside were discounted. Institutions worked together and were sustained by religious
beliefs and rituals.
However, the fundamental assumptions behind these typologies of “primitive”
or “tribal” societies were increasingly brought into question. In the 1950s Edmund
Leach and Max Gluckman, two of the leading figures in British anthropology, began
to develop models of tribal societies that emphasized conflict and change and took
account of external political and economic forces. Leach was a Malinowskian, partic-
ularly interested in individual strategies and the pursuit of sectional goals. Gluckman
was a structural functionalist of the Oxford school, who was concerned, rather, with
the ways in which inherent structural conflicts were managed. Both, however, in their
different ways, rejected simple equilibrium models and emphasized the relationships
that connected different societies. Leach also criticized the conventional strategy
of comparison. “The followers of Radcliffe-Brown are anthropological butterfly
collectors,” he charged: “arranging butterflies according to their types and subtypes
is tautology. It merely reasserts something you know already in a slightly different
form” (Leach 1966, 2). But, as the colonial period came to an end, a more radical
challenge was about to overwhelm the equilibrium models and typologies of “tribal
societies.”
After colonialism
India and Indonesia became independent in the immediate aftermath of World War
II. Between 1957 and 1966 virtually all European colonies in Africa and in the Pacific
became independent states. And now the United States began its long engagement with
postcolonial Asia and Africa.
American anthropologists had been drawn into policy-oriented research during
World War II. This was not altogether a new development. The Boasians had addressed
racism in the United States. When America declared war on the Axis powers,
anthropologists were given desks in Washington and spoke directly to administrators
and politicians. Mead, Benedict, and their associates drew on psychoanalysis and
developmental psychology to produce profiles of enemies and allies for the benefit
of government policy makers and planners. G. P. Murdock served during the war
as an officer in the US navy and edited a series of ethnographic guides to strategic
Pacific islands, guides that were later to form the model for his World Ethnographic
Survey. After the Japanese surrender, the United States was drawn into nation building
in Japan and, as the Cold War began, in the Philippines and Indonesia. For the first
time, significant numbers of American anthropologists began to specialize in societies
beyond North America, and they were now encouraged to collaborate with other social
scientists and to consult with policy makers.
Clifford Geertz was in many ways the exemplary figure in this new generation.
He was one of the early products of an interdisciplinary School of Social Relations
at Harvard University, established by the most influential social theorist of the day,
Talcott Parsons. Geertz’s work in Indonesia began as part of a team effort in which
anthropologists collaborated with economists and political scientists. In the 1960s he

collaborated with development economists—writing reports that were later elaborated
and published as monographs, such as Agricultural Involution (1963a) and Peddlers
and Princes (1963b)—and he served as a member of the very Parsonian Committee for
the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago.
But the direction of the discipline was not settled. There was a scandal over the col-
laboration of social scientists with American intelligence agencies in Chile in the early
1960s. However, the great divide was the Vietnam War. Applied, government-sponsored
social science research was discredited in the eyes of many younger anthropologists.
At the end of the turbulent 1960s, Geertz turned his back on social science and
moved from Chicago’s troubled campus to the mandarin calm of the Institute of
Advanced Study at Princeton University. Here he began to redefine anthropology as
an autonomous discipline and urged that it should make its home with the humanities
rather than among the social sciences. The subject matter of anthropology was still to
be culture, but culture was no longer conceived in the broad manner of a Tylor or a
Boas. “Cutting the culture concept to size,” Geertz believed, was necessary, “therefore
actually insuring its continued importance rather than undermining it” (1973, 4).
Indeed, “this redefinition of culture has been perhaps my most persistent interest as
an anthropologist” (Geertz 1973, 7). The term “culture” should designate “an ordered
system of meaning and symbols … in terms of which individuals define their world,
express their feelings and make their judgments” (Geertz 1973, 245).
Accordingly, cultural anthropology should leave sociology to the sociologists and
psychology to the psychologists. It was not the business of anthropology to explain indi-
vidual behavior or social action. The object was to understand and to translate public
discourses. This was a humanist pursuit. It was an illusion to imagine that there could
be a science of meaning. “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended
in webs of significance he himself has spun,” Geertz wrote, “I take culture to be these
webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law,
but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after” (1973, 5). And
he welcomed “an enormous increase in interest, not only in anthropology, but in social
studies generally, in the role of symbolic forms in human life. Meaning … has now
come back into the heart of our discipline” (Geertz 1973, 29).
The fundamental idea was that culture should be treated as a symbolic discourse. The
ethnographer was trying to grasp meanings, not speculate about functions. Translation
and exegesis, not explanation, was the goal. “Doing ethnography is like trying to read
(in the sense of ‘construct a reading of’) a manuscript,” Geertz wrote, and this text was
“written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shared
behaviour” (1973, 10). The ethnographer admittedly had a hand in fabricating these
texts, but the crucial act was the construction of a reading, an interpretation.
Europe: Structuralism and Marxism
There were similar movements in European anthropology, away from the social sci-
ences and toward a more culturalist agenda. Evans-Pritchard delivered a provocative
public lecture in 1950 in which he argued that it had been a mistake to situate social
anthropology within the social sciences. He proposed, rather, “that social anthropol-
ogy is a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy or art, … that it
studies societies as moral systems and not as natural systems, that it is interested in
design rather than in process, and that it therefore seeks patterns and not scientific
laws, and interprets rather than explains” (Evans-Pritchard 1950, 123). Other influen-
tial European social anthropologists were also engaging with “cultural” issues but not
in the humanist fashion advocated by Evans-Pritchard and practiced by Geertz; they
became structuralists.
Structuralism, developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, borrowed from linguistics, which
Lévi-Strauss believed had achieved the stature of a true science, penetrating beneath
the surface of appearances to the mechanics of the mind. Ideas about the world,
systems of classification, myths, kinship systems, and rules of marriage—all were
collective, symbolic productions very much like languages. Lévi-Strauss’s ambition
was to show that these were all governed by a deep structure of contrasting features,
although this structure remained unconscious, like the phonological rules that govern
our spoken communications. A common, rule-governed, human way of developing
ideas could be discerned behind even the most exotic and surprising beliefs. It
depended not on formal logic but on something deeper, more universally human,
the impulse to make binary oppositions. Everywhere people impose a pattern on
their world by classifying the objects in the natural and social environment. In 1962
Lévi-Strauss published La pensée sauvage—translated into English as The Savage Mind
([1962] 1966)—which examined the manner in which people construct a “logic of the
concrete,” whose symbols were drawn from the homely elements of everyday life; this
logic was applied to make sense of the social and natural environment. Lévi-Strauss
then took up the study of American mythologies, which deployed a logic of the
concrete to construct symbolic discourses that addressed the eternal questions of life
and death, the foundation of the social order, the relationship between society and
nature.
Structuralism had a great influence in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, across a range
of disciplines including literary theory, history, and classical studies. However, the struc-
turalists were challenged by Marxist approaches that emerged in Paris in the 1970s.
Marxist anthropologists insisted on the connections between “relations of meaning and
relations of force, symbols and ideology, domination and determination” (Augé 1982,
67). They constructed typologies that grouped “social formations” (their preferred term
for societies) by their modes of production, typologies that were eerily reminiscent of
those proposed by the Victorian evolutionists but with the added spice of class conflict.
Lineage systems, for instance, were recast as incipient class structures, in which the
elders exploited women and young men. But like structuralism, this Marxist anthro-
pology concerned itself exclusively with “primitive” societies. Maurice Godelier and
Marshall Sahlins insisted that “primitive” (or “tribal” or Stone Age) societies worked
very differently from modern societies. Their economies were embedded in their kin-
ship systems, which provided the framework of primitive social formations.
Neoevolutionism and symbolic anthropology
As a Marxist anthropology confronted structuralism in Europe, American anthropolo-

gists also divided between two parties, not Marxists and structuralists but evolutionists
and idealists. In The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968), Marvin Harris represented
the history of anthropology as one long argument between a neo-Darwinian party of
science and an antiscience party of cultural relativists, the heirs of the school of Boas.
This was not good history, but it reflected the terms of the debate that raged within
American anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s, as neoevolutionism, which Harris
termed “cultural materialism,” confronted an idealist movement that was dubbed
“symbolic anthropology.”
The pioneering figures of the neoevolutionist movement were Leslie White
(1900–1975) and Julian Steward (1902–72). White was a unilinear evolutionist, who
held that human beings had developed culture, a “superorganic” complex of tools and
knowledge, armed with which they were bringing nature increasingly under control.
As knowledge and technology increased, cultures generated more and more energy,
which was the measuring stick of their progress. Steward, in contrast, characterized
himself as a multilinear evolutionist. For him, cultures followed their own paths of
development as they adapted to local ecological constraints.
Studies by Roy Rappaport (1968) and Marvin Harris (e.g., 1975) explained rituals and
taboos in functionalist terms. They were ways of managing resources, or they steered
people toward healthy eating, or they sanctioned desperate measures that were nec-
essary for survival. Other members of the school produced theoretical and compara-
tive accounts of cultural evolution. Sahlins (1963) sketched a model of political evolu-
tion, set in Melanesia and Polynesia where “big man” societies, with unstable leaders,
gave way to hereditary chieftaincies as agricultural productivity improved. A widely
read series of introductory textbooks dealt with “hunters” (Service 1966), “tribesmen”
(Sahlins 1968), and “peasants” (Wolf 1966), setting out the stages of the evolution of
society.
Symbolic anthropologists understood culture very differently. Like Geertz, they
treated culture as a cluster of symbolic codes. Programs trading under the names of “the
new ethnography” and “thick description” operationalized this view of culture, dealing
particularly with symbols and their meanings. Anthropologists of this persuasion
rejected the functionalism and utilitarianism of the neoevolutionists and were hostile,
or at best indifferent, to sociological considerations.
Culture and human nature
In the last third of the twentieth century the battle of the paradigms divided the disci-
pline, particularly in the United States, which had become by far its largest center. In his
Culture and Practical Reason (1976), Marshall Sahlins made a heroic attempt to bring
the two apparently contradictory approaches together. A few years later, however, in
a widely read survey of the state of the argument, Sherry Ortner (1984) reported that
the battle of the paradigms had ended. Both factions were exhausted and disillusioned.
The protagonists had come to feel that they were “unable to handle what the other side
did (the symbolic anthropologists in renouncing all claims to ‘explanation,’ the cul-
tural ecologists in losing sight of the frames of meaning within which human action
takes place).” Moreover, they were “both weak in what neither of them did, which was
much of any systematic sociology” (Ortner 1984, 134). Ortner predicted a turn toward
the sociological approach of Pierre Bourdieu, but in the event most American anthro-
pologists kept their distance from the social sciences and the 1980s and 1990s saw an
escalation of the culture wars, particularly in the United States. Ever more purist cul-
turalists confronted neoevolutionists.
Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, published in 1975, inspired
by the modern revolution in genetics, triggered a new and radical biological deter-
minism. According to this, human nature has been formed by our long history as
hunter-gatherers, when selective pressures were sharpest, and we share basic drives
and responses with other primates, perhaps even with all living creatures; culture is no
more than a thin veneer.
All this was anathema to the culturalists, who contended that the distinctive feature of
humankind was culture—language, symbols, knowledge, ideas, and beliefs. And Geertz
insisted that there could be no science of culture, no cross-cultural generalizations about
human nature. Some American cultural anthropologists went further, veering toward
a full-blown cultural determinism. “There are only cultural constructions of reality,”
David Schneider wrote, in an extreme but by no means exceptional formulation of
culturalist doctrine: “In this sense, then, ‘nature’ and the ‘facts of life’ … have no inde-
pendent existence apart from how they are defined by the culture” (1976, 204).
A central controversy concerned kinship. Functionalist anthropologists had no doubt
that kinship was the fundamental social institution. In every society it provided people
with their primary identities, their most secure ties, and their fallback social security
system. Kinship relationships were adaptable and adjusted to suit different social con-
ditions. Everywhere, however, they rested on genealogical connections.
The sociobiologists also took kinship to be the core human bond, but they believed
that it was essentially a matter of biology. In their view, all human beings—indeed all
living creatures—were programmed to propagate a genetic endowment, a hard-won
survival kit. For some 95 percent of human history our ancestors were hunter-gatherers,
living a precarious existence, constantly threatened by famine, disease, and violent
death. According to the sociobiologists, humankind survived only because men were
compelled, blindly and unconsciously, to invest in their own children and indeed
to father as many children as possible. Moreover, men extended their sympathies to
the children of their siblings because they had so many genes in common. Women
were programmed in a different fashion: bound to their children physically and
emotionally, women yearned for a powerful protector. Aggression, jealousy, and
philandering paid off for men, and loyalty and submission for women. Far from being
a cultural construction, kinship was real, shaping behavior as it operated at a profound,
unconscious level.
Cultural relativists challenged every one of these propositions. David Schneider
argued in a series of books and papers published in the 1970s that the Western idea
of kinship, as rooted in blood ties and mapped in genealogies, was culturally specific,
a construct of Western ideology. Other peoples had quite different notions of family
ties; indeed, they might not be ideas that could be translated as “family,” or “kinship,”
or “marriage.” In Schneider’s view, ethnographers should clear their minds and attune
themselves to the ideas held by their informants.
A younger generation pushed Geertz’s interpretive anthropology further in a
relativist direction. George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986, vii) remarked that
“contemporary interpretive anthropology is nothing other than relativism, rearmed
and strengthened for an era of intellectual ferment.” Their key move was to treat
ethnographic field notes, reports, and monographs as literary texts to be analyzed,
indeed deconstructed. Geertz had argued that the anthropologist both reads and writes
a text—he “inscribes” social discourse: “‘What does the ethnographer do?’—he writes”
(1973, 19). Strongly influenced by Geertz but reacting against him, the contributors
to an extremely influential postmodernist symposium, Writing Culture (Clifford and
Marcus 1986), insisted that this writing down does not constitute an authoritative
interpretation, different in kind from the cultural text that it pretends to inscribe.
Rather, it constitutes another cultural text. Its author, like the native subject, is trapped
in a web of significance that he or she has constructed but cannot escape.
According to the postmodernists, the assertion of objectivity was a rhetorical tactic.
It masked a claim to authority, political as well as intellectual. There could be no single,
true, objective account of a cultural event or a social process. The new wave ethno-
grapher preferred the image of a cacophony of voices commenting upon each other.
The ethnographer should be reflexive, critically aware of where he or she was coming
from, conscious of the problematic nature of ethnographic writing. Some argued that
the ethnographer should also recognize a moral, or political, responsibility. The voices
of silenced minorities had to be given a hearing. The foreign ethnographer should not
impose a voice-over commentary, let alone suggest that the outside expert could present
another, truer perspective on local social experiences. Perhaps only the native could
speak for the native.
Anthropology in a globalizing world
Despite the disintegration of the four-field approach, central research programs in

anthropology have remained remarkably stable. Each addresses a dimension of human
action. The organizing ideas of “evolution,” “culture,” and “social system” continued
to define distinctive approaches, although these were periodically reformulated in
response to broader shifts in biology, social science, and theoretical discourses in the
humanities.
Biological anthropology had its roots in the racial science of the Victorians, but ideas
about human races came under sustained attack from the 1920s and racial classifications
were totally discredited by the race dogmas of fascism. In the 1930s and 1940s there was
a revolution in the biological sciences. The new evolutionary synthesis brought Dar-
winian theory together with population genetics. The research program of biological
anthropology changed to fit the new paradigm, repudiating what Sherwood Washburn
dubbed “the religion of taxonomy.” Washburn’s address, “The New Physical Anthropol-
ogy” (1951), became the foundational text for the next generation of biological anthro-
pologists.
Some anthropologists and psychologists attempted to define enduring features
of behavior that had been inherited from primate ancestors and modified during
the long age of human hunter-gatherers, and that perhaps persisted—with further
modifications—through the Neolithic and still shaped motivations, modes of sexual
behavior, and sociability. This broad thesis was operationalized in two successive
movements, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Washburn, the doyen of
biological anthropology, mocked sociobiology as the science that pretends that
human beings cannot speak. Social and cultural anthropologists objected that these
approaches underplayed the power of human reflection and the reality of rapid cultural
and social change. More recently, in line with great advances in neuroscience, attention
has shifted to the enduring and universal characteristics of the human brain. Neural
functions, modes of perception, even intellectual processes, have common features
everywhere—a challenge that has drawn in anthropologists formed by structuralism,
since Lévi-Strauss claimed that the “logic of the concrete” reflected universal properties
of the human mind.
By the 1960s all the social sciences had radically recast, in some cases even aban-
doned, the classical equilibrium models, including functionalism and structuralism.
Social scientists had to come to terms with rapid increases in urbanization, grow-
ing streams of migration, the internationalization of religious conflicts, and above
all the exponential growth of trade. Not even the most isolated and conservative
societies escaped these processes. Conceptualizing this process of encompassment,
or “modernization,” theorists emphasized relationships between what were termed
“center” and “periphery.” These relations might be conceived of as primarily cultural,
political, or economic and as taking the form of “globalization,” “modernization,” or
“neoimperalism.”
It was obviously no longer possible, if it ever had been, to posit a distinctive type
of society (“preliterate,” “tribal”) that had common characteristics everywhere, aside
from relative social and cultural marginalization and low social status in industrializ-
ing states. Primitivism nevertheless remained a popular credo, fed by the mass media
and given some authority by popular science texts like Jared Diamond’s The World until
Yesterday, with its populist subtitle (which Margaret Mead would have endorsed half
a century earlier), “What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?” (Diamond 2012).
An academic primitivist anthropology also persisted, and there were attempts to refresh
its conceptual apparatus (notably, the “ontological turn”: see Viveiros de Castro 2012).
A primitivist anthropology also attracted political support from the Indigenous Peo-
ples’ Movement (see Kuper 2003). However, anthropologists could not return to Eden.
Wherever they went they found people caught up in rapidly changing and expanding
relationships with the outside world.
Those anthropologists who saw themselves as social scientists were dissatisfied with
the culturalist discourse of the late twentieth century. It excluded much that had been
central to social anthropology. Politics was treated simply as rhetoric. Ethnic identity
was merely an ideological construction. Religions were reduced to cosmologies.
Kinship was a symbolic statement about shared identity, not a system of working
connections on which people depended for dear life. Economics was about conceptions
of nature, production, and reproduction but excluded such mundane factors as land
law, labor, budgets, or calculations of profit and loss. Ethnographies were, at best,
tentative essays on the difficulties of intercultural communication.
From the idealist point of view of the culturalists, cultures are apparently very differ-
ent, even incommensurate; indeed, the culturalists celebrated the very various ways in
which people think about the world. But social anthropologists remained interested in
the conditions and organization of daily life. They were impressed, rather, by the recur-
rence of certain institutions, the limited range of variation, the very common strategic
responses to the problems of getting by, making do, rubbing along. An anthropology
that situated itself within the social sciences had its own agenda, and this was very dif-
ferent from the culturalist program.
The younger generation of social anthropologists is theoretically eclectic, drawing
on a range of sociological and historical discourses. Their arguments are closely tied
to detailed ethnographic observations, but ethnographies no longer describe isolated,
bounded, traditional, monocultural societies. Rather, the most exotic communities are
presented as part of the wider world, the site of intellectual and political crosscurrents,
echoing to debates and dissension. Even the most apparently traditional societies are
not presented as unchanging, as mysteriously or enchantingly other. In order to make
sense of their world, even the most conservative and apparently isolated people appeal
to shifting frames of reference. Nor is this all taken to be a sign of modernity or a marker
of uncomfortable and ill-comprehended change, to be blamed perhaps on a vaguely
conceived neoliberalism. Rather, it is the normal state of things everywhere at all times.
Comparison
Nearly all research funding in the social sciences is earmarked for the study of North
Americans and the population of the European Union. Ninety-six percent of the sub-
jects of studies reported in the leading American psychology journals are drawn from
Western industrial societies (Arnett 2008). These represent a minuscule and distinctly
nonrandom sample of humanity. The leading economics journals publish more papers
dealing with the United States than with Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East
and Africa combined, according to a report in the Economist. And it is a science of
the rich. “The world’s poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profession,” the
report noted. (Economist 2014). The result is that the mainstream social sciences are
parochial in their interests and ethnocentric in their assumptions, and they take for
granted very questionable generalizations about human nature, belief systems, decision
making, economic motivations, sex and gender, customs, and institutions.
There is also a methodological problem. The other social sciences tend to be scien-
tistic, in thrall to statistical exercises and large surveys, exercises that can reveal little
about the inner workings of institutions, the informal strategies of social life, or the
ways in which people understand their circumstances and frame their choices. Social
and cultural anthropologists favor ethnographic field methods that are more likely to
engage with the experiences of everyday life and to convey the ways in which differ-
ent peoples order their existence and interpret nature and society. Yet, although a great
deal of professional and interesting ethnography is published, which addresses current
theoretical debates and sometimes engages with issues of public policy, anthropologists
have recently neglected comparative studies (Gingrich and Fox 2002).
Established comparative approaches have been criticized on methodological and
even moral grounds and have been dismissed, perhaps too glibly, as relics of a suspect
positivism. To be sure, comparative research is not straightforward, and it is necessary
to put in question the way in which the units of comparison are constructed. No doubt
fresh approaches are needed. And yet there remains a very real need for a broader
understanding of how other people construct their worlds and manage their lives. An
essential part of the vocation of anthropology must be to bring an understanding of a
variety of human ways of life into the discourse of the social sciences and to subject
the concepts and theories of all the human sciences to the test of comparison.
SEE ALSO: Africa, Sub-Saharan, Emergence of Anthropology in; Animism; Anthro-

pological Knowledge and Styles of Publication; Anthropology, Careers in; Applied
Anthropology; Argentina, Anthropology in; Australia, Anthropology in; Bartolomé,
Leopoldo José (1942–2013); Bastian, Adolf (1826–1905); Biological and Evolutionary
Anthropology; Boas, Franz (1858–1942); Cardoso de Oliveira, Roberto (1928–2006);
Clash of Civilizations, The, Anthropology and; Comparison; Conceptualism,
Ethnographic; Contemporary Art; Cosmopolitanism; Cultural Attraction Theory;
Cultural Evolution; Cultural Models; Cultural Politics; Culture, Concept of; Darwin,
Charles, Influence on Anthropology of; Denmark, Anthropology in; Diffusionism;
Digital Anthropology; Discourse; Douglas, Mary (1921–2007); Durkheim, Émile
(1858–1917); Ecological Anthropology; Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The / Les
formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse; Elementary Structures of Kinship, The / Les struc-
tures élémentaires de la parenté; Empiricism; Ethnography; Ethnography, Experimental;
Ethnology; Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1902–73); Evolutionism; Fiction, Anthropological
Themes in; Fieldwork, Processing the Experience: The Work of the Mind; France,
Anthropology in; Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939); Functionalism; Geertz, Clifford
(1926–2006); Gellner, Ernest (1925–95); Germany, Anthropology in; Gluckman, Max
(1911–75); History and Anthropology; Home; India, Anthropology in; Interpretative
Anthropology; Interviews with Eminent Anthropologists: An Online Resource;
Kinship: Sociocultural Approaches (the Nineteenth Century); Kinship: Sociocultural
Approaches (Recent Approaches); Kinship Systems; Language and Anthropology;
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009); Magic; Maine, Henry (1822–88); Malinowski,
Bronisław (1884–1942); Mauss, Marcel (1872–1950); McLennan, John Ferguson
(1827–81); Mead, Margaret (1901–78); Media Anthropology; Medical Science and
Technological Studies; Mexico, Anthropology in; Missionaries and Anthropology;
Montage; Morgan, Lewis Henry (1818–81); Myth; Netherlands, Anthropology in
the; Norway, Anthropology in; Poland, Anthropology in; Policy, Anthropology and;
Political Anthropology; Portugal, Anthropology in; Positivism; Primitivism; Protected
Areas; Race and Racisms; Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1881–1955); Ramos, Arthur
(1903–49); Reflexivity; Relevance; Religion and Science; Representation, Politics of;
Ritual; Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI); Sahlins, Marshall (b. 1930); Social
and Cultural Anthropology; Sociobiology and Anthropology; Sound Recordings;
South Africa, Anthropology in; Steward, Julian H. (1902–72); Stocking, George W.
(1928–2013); Structural Functionalism; Structuralism (Linguistic Anthropology);
Sweden, Anthropology in; Tactility; Totemism; Tourism, Travel, and Pilgrimage; Tylor,
Edward (1832–1917); United Kingdom, Anthropology in; United States, Anthropol-
ogy in; Utopias and Dystopias, Anthropology and; Virchow, Rudolf (1821–1902);
Visual Anthropology; Washburn, Sherwood (1911–2000); World Anthropologies
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Anthropology: Scope of the Discipline

collections of Native American artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

The doctrine of progress and the “evolutionists”

These sketched a progression, paced by the development of reason, from an original

Geography, folklore, and diffusionism: The German school

Another intellectual tradition was inspired by the very different proto-Romantic or

Franz Boas, American anthropology, and the spread

The evolutionists relied on ethnographic data provided by missionaries, explorers, and

Rivers’s counterpart at Oxford, R. R. Marett, added that intensive research would

Malinowski and “functionalism”

The outstanding exponent of “intensive” fieldwork was Bronisław Malinowski. A young

state of equilibrium. A historian of social science, Dorothy Ross, points to “a movement

The comparative study of “tribal” societies

anthropologists collaborated with economists and political scientists. In the 1960s he

Europe: Structuralism and Marxism

Neoevolutionism and symbolic anthropology

As a Marxist anthropology confronted structuralism in Europe, American anthropolo-

Culture and human nature

Anthropology in a globalizing world

Despite the disintegration of the four-field approach, central research programs in

SEE ALSO: Africa, Sub-Saharan, Emergence of Anthropology in; Animism; Anthro-

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

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