Anthropology, History of

Thomas H Eriksen, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Anthropology, the study of humanity seen from the perspective of social and cultural diversity, was established as an
academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. At the time, broad, evolutionist perspectives were predominant, but
would be eclipsed in the early twentieth century by the cultural relativism introduced by Franz Boas and the fieldwork
revolution championed by Bronislaw Malinowski. During the twentieth century, anthropology became a diverse pursuit
ranging from intensive functionalist studies of small-scale societies to ambitious modeling of the human mind, interpretive
approaches and ecological accounts. Toward the end of the century, Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial critiques led to
a heightened sensitivity toward methodological and ethical issues, and a major preoccupation in the early twenty-first century
has consisted in accounting for the impact of globalization on local communities. In this intensely interconnected world,
where formerly influential theoretical paradigms have collapsed, anthropology remains committed to comparison and
ethnographic fieldwork, applying methods initially developed to study tribal society to research on complex societies.

Early attempts at accounting for cultural variation and human
universals, the subject matter of anthropology, include ancient
Greek geography and history, Renaissance and early modern
travelogues, and philosophical treatises from the European
Enlightenment. They fell short of being scientific because of
inherent bias, lack of theoretical sophistication, and,
frequently, poor empirical material. In the nineteenth century,
theorists such as Henry Lewis Morgan, Henry Maine, and
Edward Tylor developed ambitious evolutionist theories of
culture, implying a hierarchical view of cultures. Modern
anthropology emerged in the early decades of the twentieth
century, when a new generation of scholars, notably Franz
Boas, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Marcel
Mauss, rejected evolutionism replacing it with cultural rela-
tivism, also refining research methodologies and methods of
comparison. In the decades following World War II, new
approaches such as structuralism, cultural ecology, and neo-
Marxism appeared, and anthropology grew and diversified,
branching into various specializations including psychological
and medical anthropology, eventually moving increasingly
toward the study of modern phenomena such as nationalism
and consumption, yet retaining its commitment to the inten-
sive, fieldwork-based study of social life in local settings.
Social or cultural anthropology can be defined, loosely and
broadly, as the comparative science of culture and society, and
it is the only major discipline in the social sciences that has
concentrated most of its attention on non-Western people.
Although many of the classic problems investigated by
anthropologists are familiar to the European history of ideas,
the subject as it is known today emerged only in the early
twentieth century, became institutionalized at universities in
the Western world in midcentury, and underwent a phenom-
enal growth and diversification in the latter half of the century.
Foundations and Early Schools
Proto-Anthropology
Interest in cultural variation and human universals can be
found as far back in history as the Greek city-state. The historian
Herodotos (fifth century BC) wrote accounts of ‘barbarian’
peoples to the east and north of the peninsula, comparing their
customs and beliefs to those of Athens, and the group of
philosophers known as the Sophists were perhaps the first
philosophical relativists, arguing (as many twentieth-century
anthropologists later did) that there can be no absolute truth
because, as one would put it today, truth is contextual. Yet their
interest in cultural variation fell short of being scientific, chiefly
because Herodotos lacked theory while the Sophists lacked
empirical material.
Centuries later, scholarly interest in cultural variation and
human nature reemerged in Europe because of the new
intellectual freedom of the Renaissance and questions arising
from European overseas exploits. Michel de Montaigne
(sixteenth century), Thomas Hobbes (seventeenth century),
and Giambattista Vico (eighteenth century) were among the
thinkers of the early modern era who tried to account for
cultural variability and global cultural history as well as
dealing with the challenge from relativism. Eighteenth-century
philosophers such as Locke, Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, and
Rousseau developed theories of human nature, moral
philosophies, and social theories, taking into account an
awareness of cultural differences. The early German romantic
Herder challenged Voltaire’s universalistic vision by arguing
that each people (Volk) had a right to retaining its own, unique
values and customs – in a manner reminiscent of later cultural
relativism romanticism. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth
century, several of the general questions still raised by
anthropologists had already been raised: Universalism vs
relativism (what is common to humanity; what is culturally
specific), ethnocentrism vs cultural relativism (moral judg-
ments vs neutral descriptions of other peoples), and humanity
vs the rest of the animal kingdom (culture vs nature). Twen-
tieth-century anthropology has taught that these and other
essentially philosophical problems are best investigated
through the detailed study of living people in existing societies
through ethnographic fieldwork, and by applying carefully
devised methods of comparison to the bewildering variety of
‘customs and beliefs.’ It would take several generations after
Montesquieu’s comparative musings about Persia and France,

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03025-7 765
766 Anthropology, History of
in his Lettres persanes, before anthropology achieved this mark
of scientific endeavor.
Victorian Anthropology
The first general theories of cultural variation to enjoy a lasting
influence were arguably those of two men trained as lawyers:
Henry Maine (1822–88) in Britain and Lewis Henry Morgan
(1818–82) in the United States. Both presented evolutionist
models of variation and change, where Western European
societies were seen as the pinnacle of human development. In
his Ancient Law (1861), Maine distinguished between status
and contract societies, a divide which corresponds roughly to
later dichotomies between traditional and modern societies,
or, in the late nineteenth-century German sociologist Ferdi-
nand Tönnies’ terminology, Gemeinschaft (community) and
Gesellschaft (society); status societies are assumed to operate
on the basis of kinship and myth, while individual merit and
achievement are decisive in contract societies. Although simple
contrasts of this kind have regularly been severely criticized,
they continue to exert a certain influence on anthropological
thinking.
Morgan’s contributions to anthropology were wide ranging
and, among other things, he wrote a detailed ethnography of
the Iroquois. His evolutionary scheme, presented in Ancient
Society (1877), which influenced Marx and Engels, distin-
guished between seven stages (from lower savagery to civili-
zation). His materialist account of cultural change influenced
Marx and Engels. His pioneering work on kinship divided
kinship systems into a limited number of types, and saw
kinship terminology as a key to understanding society. Writing
in the same period, the historian of religion Robertson Smith
and the lawyer J.J. Bachofen offered, respectively, theories of
monotheistic religion and of the (wrongly assumed) historical
transition from matriliny to patriliny.
An untypical scholar in the otherwise evolutionist Victorian
era, the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) reac-
ted against simplistic typological schemata. Drawing inspira-
tion from Herderian romanticism and the humanistic tradition
in German academia, Bastian wrote prolifically on cultural
history, avoiding unwarranted generalizations, yet he held that
all humans have the same pattern of thinking, thus anticipating
structuralism.
The leading British anthropologist of the late Victorian era
was Edward Tylor (1832–1917), whose writings include
a famous definition of culture (dating from 1871), seeing it as
the sum total of collective human achievements (thus con-
trasting it to nature). Tylor’s student James Frazer (1854–1941)
published the massive and very influential Golden Bough (1890,
rev. ed. 1911–15), an ambitious comparative study of myth
and religion.
Intellectual developments outside anthropology in the
second half of the nineteenth century also had a powerful
impact. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, first pre-
sented in his Origin of Species from 1859, would both be seen as
a condition for anthropology (positing that all humans are
closely related) and, later, as a threat to it (arguing the primacy
of the biological over the cultural). The emergence of classic
sociological theory in the works of Comte, Marx, and Tönnies,
and later Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, and Simmel, provided
anthropologists with general theories of society, although their
applicability to non-European societies continues to be dis-
puted (see Sociology, History of).
The quality of the data used by the early anthropologists
was variable. Most of them relied on written sources, ranging
from missionaries’ accounts to travelogues of varying accuracy.
The need for more reliable data began to make itself felt.
Expeditions and systematic surveys now provided researchers
around the turn of the twentieth century with improved
knowledge of cultural variation, which eventually led to the
downfall of the ambitious theories of unilineal evolution
characteristic of nineteenth-century anthropology.
An Austro-German specialty proposed both as an alterna-
tive and a complement to evolutionist thinking was diffu-
sionism, the doctrine of the historical diffusion of cultural
traits. Never a part of the mainstream outside of the German-
speaking world, elaborate theories of cultural diffusion con-
tinued to thrive, particularly in Berlin and Vienna, until after
World War II (Gingrich, 2005). As there were serious problems
of verification associated with the theory, it was condemned as
speculative by anthropologists committed to fieldwork and,
furthermore, research priorities were to shift from general
cultural history to intensive studies of particular societies.
In spite of theoretical developments and methodological
refinements, the emergence of anthropology, as the discipline
is known today, is rightly associated with four scholars working
in three countries in the early decades of the twentieth century:
Franz Boas in the United States, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and
Bronislaw Malinowski in the United Kingdom, and Marcel
Mauss in France.
Boas and Cultural Relativism
Boas (1858–1942), a German migrant to the United States,
who had briefly studied anthropology with Bastian, carried
out research among Eskimos and Kwakiutl Indians in the
1890s. In his teaching and professional leadership, he
strengthened the ‘four-field approach’ in American anthro-
pology, which still sets it apart from European anthropology,
including both cultural and social anthropology, physical
anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics. Although cultural
relativism had been introduced more than a century before, it
was Boas who made it a central premise for anthropological
research. Against the evolutionists, he argued that each culture
had to be understood in its own terms and that it would be
scientifically misleading to rank other cultures according to
a Western, ethnocentric typology gauging ‘levels of develop-
ment.’ Boas also promoted historical particularism, the view that
all societies or cultures had a unique history that could not be
reduced to a category in some universalistic scheme. On
related grounds, Boas argued incessantly against the claims of
racist views of human diversity.
Perhaps because of his particularism, Boas never systema-
tized his ideas in a theoretical treatise. Several of his students
and associates nevertheless did develop general theories of
culture, notably Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, and Robert
Lowie. His most famous student was Margaret Mead (1901–
78). Although her best-selling books on Pacific societies have
been criticized for being superficial, she used material from
non-Western societies to raise questions about gender

relations, socialization, and politics in the West, and Mead’s
work indicates the potential of cultural criticism inherent in the
discipline.
One of Boas’ most remarkable associates, the linguist
Edward Sapir (1884–1939), formulated, with his student
Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which posits
that language determines cognition. Consistent with a radical
cultural relativism, the hypothesis implies that, for example,
the Hopi perceive the world in a fundamentally different way
from Westerners, due to differences in the structure of their
respective languages. A controversial perspective from the
beginning, the hypothesis has nonetheless continued to be
discussed in linguistics and linguistic anthropology.
The Two British Schools
While modern American anthropology had been shaped by the
Boasians and their relativist concerns, as well as the perceived
need to record native cultures before their anticipated disap-
pearance, the situation in the major colonial power, Great
Britain, was different. The degree of complicity between colo-
nial agencies and anthropologists is debatable, but the very fact
of imperialism was an inescapable premise for British anthro-
pology until after World War II.
The man who is often hailed as the founder of modern
British social anthropology was a Polish immigrant, Bronislaw
Malinowski (1884–1942), whose fieldwork for over 2 years in
the Trobriand Islands (1914–18) set a standard for ethno-
graphic data collection that is still largely unchallenged. Mali-
nowski argued the need to learn the local language properly
and to engage in everyday life, in order to see the world from
the actor’s point of view and to understand the interconnec-
tions between social institutions and cultural notions. Mali-
nowski placed an unusual emphasis on the acting individual,
seeing social structure not as a determinant of but as a frame-
work for action, and he wrote about a wide range of topics,
from garden magic, economics, and sex to the puzzling kula
trade. Although he dealt with issues of general concern, he
nearly always took his point of departure in his Trobriand
ethnography, demonstrating a method of generalization very
different from that of the previous generation with its scant
local knowledge.
The other major British anthropologist of the time was A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955). An admirer of Durkheim’s
sociology, Radcliffe-Brown did relatively little fieldwork
himself, but aimed at the development of a ‘natural science of
society’ where universal laws of social life could be formulated.
His theory, known as structural functionalism, saw the indi-
vidual as unimportant, emphasizing instead the social insti-
tutions (kinship, norms, politics, etc.). Most social and cultural
phenomena were seen as functional in the sense that they
contributed to the maintenance of the overall social structure
(see Functionalism in Anthropology).
Despite their differences in emphasis, both British schools
had a sociological concern in common (which they did not
share with most Americans), and tended to see social institu-
tions as functionally integrative. Both rejected the wide-ranging
claims of diffusionism and evolutionism, and yet, the tension
between structural explanations and actor-centered accounts
remains strong in British anthropology even today.
Anthropology, History of 767
Malinowski’s students included Raymond Firth, Audrey
Richards, and Isaac Schapera, while Radcliffe-Brown, in addi-
tion to enlisting E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes –
arguably the most powerful British anthropologists in the
1950s – on his side, taught widely, and introduced structural
functionalism to several foreign universities. British interwar
anthropology was characteristically oriented toward kinship,
politics, and economics, with Evans-Pritchard’s masterpiece
The Nuer (1940) demonstrating the intellectual power of
a discipline combining detailed ethnography, comparison, and
elegant models. Later, his models would be criticized for being
too elegant to fit the facts on the ground – a very Malinowskian
objection.
Mauss
No fieldwork-based anthropology developed in the German-
speaking region, and German anthropology was marginalized
after World War II. In France, the situation was different.
Already in 1902, Durkheim had published, with his nephew
Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), an important treatise on primitive
classification; in 1908, Arnold van Gennep published Les Rites
de Passage, an important analysis of initiation rites, and Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl elucidated a theory, later refuted by both Evans-
Pritchard, Mauss, and others, on the ‘primitive mind,’ which
he held to be ‘prelogical.’ New empirical material of high
quality was being produced by thorough observers such as
Maurice Leenhardt in New Caledonia and Marcel Griaule in
West Africa.
Less methodologically purist than the emerging British
traditions and more philosophically adventurous than the
Americans, interwar French anthropology, under the leadership
of Mauss, developed a distinct flavor, witnessed in the influ-
ential journal L’Année Sociologique, founded by Durkheim and
edited by Mauss after Durkheim’s death in 1917. Drawing on
his vast knowledge of languages, cultural history, and ethnog-
raphy, Mauss, who never did fieldwork himself, wrote several
learned, original, compact essays ranging from gift exchange
(Essai sur le Don, 1924) to the nation, the body, and the concept
of the person. Mauss’ theoretical position was complex. He
believed in systematic comparison and the existence of recur-
rent patterns in social life at all times and in all places, yet he
often defended relativist views in his reasoning about similar-
ities and differences between societies.
Not a prolific writer, Mauss exerted an enormous influence
on later French anthropology through his teaching. Among his
students and associates were most of the major French
anthropologists at the time, and the three leading postwar
scholars in the field – Louis Dumont, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and
Georges Balandier – were all deeply indebted to Mauss.
Some General Points
The transition from evolutionist theory and grand syntheses to
more specific, detailed, and empirically founded work, in
reality amounted to an intellectual revolution. The work of
Tylor and Morgan had been relegated to the mists of history by
the mid-twentieth century, and the discipline had been taken
over by small groups of scholars who saw intensive fieldwork,
cultural relativism, the study of single societies, and rigorous
768 Anthropology, History of
comparison as its essence. Today, the academic institutions, the
conferences, and the learned journals all build on the anthro-
pology of Boas, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Mauss. This
is to a great extent also true of the anthropological traditions of
other countries (Vermeulen and Roldán, 1995), including
India, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, the Netherlands, Spain,
and Scandinavia. Soviet/Russian and East European anthro-
pologies have followed different itineraries, retaining a
connection with the German tradition, where Volkskunde
(ethnology, studies of rural folk culture in one’s own society)
was distinguished from Völkerkunde (literally the study of
peoples, that is other cultures). In Russia, there had existed
a rich tradition of empirically based anthropological research
since the early nineteenth century, and twentieth century Soviet
anthropology combined Völkerkunde and Marxist influence in
original ways (see Eriksen and Nielsen, 2012), but there was
little contact with the Western mainstream until the end of
Communism (but see Gellner, 1980).
Anthropology in the Second Half of the Twentieth
Century
The numbers of anthropologists and institutions devoted to
teaching and research in the field grew rapidly after World War
II. The discipline diversified. New specializations such as
psychological anthropology, political anthropology, and the
anthropology of ritual emerged, and the geographical foci of
the discipline multiplied: whereas the Pacific had been the
most fertile area for theoretical developments in the 1920s, and
Africa had played a similar part in the 1930s and 1940s, while
the preoccupation with North American Indians had been
stable throughout, the 1950s saw a growing interest in the
‘hybrid’ societies of Latin America and the Caribbean as well as
the anthropology of India and South-East Asia, and the New
Guinean highlands became similarly important in the 1960s.
Such shifts in spatial emphasis had consequences for theoret-
ical developments, as each region posed its own peculiar
problems.
From the 1950s, the end of colonialism also affected
anthropology, both in a banal sense – it became more difficult
to obtain research permits – and more profoundly, as the
subject–object relationship between the observer and the
observed became problematic as the traditionally ‘observed’
peoples increasingly had their own intellectuals and spokes-
persons who frequently objected to Western interpretations of
their way of life.
Structuralism
The first major theory to emerge after World War II was Claude
Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism. Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) devel-
oped an original theory of the human mind, drawing on
structural linguistics, Mauss’ theory of exchange, and Lévy-
Bruhl’s theory of the primitive mind (which Lévi-Strauss
opposed). His first major work, Les Structures Elémentaires de la
Parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1949), introduced
a grammatical, formal way of thinking about kinship, with
particular reference to systems of marriage (the exchange of
women between groups). Lévi-Strauss later expanded his
theory to cover totemism, myth, and art. Never uncontrover-
sial, structuralism had an enormous impact on French intel-
lectual life far beyond the confines of anthropology. In the
English-speaking world, the reception of structuralism was
delayed, as Lévi-Strauss’ major works were not translated until
the 1960s, but he had his admirers and detractors from the
beginning. Structuralism was criticized for being untestable,
positing as it did certain unprovable and unfalsifiable proper-
ties of the human mind (most famously the propensity to think
in terms of contrasts or binary oppositions), but many saw
Lévi-Strauss’ work, ultimately committed to human universals,
as an immense source of inspiration in the study of symbolic
systems such as knowledge and myth.
A different, and for a long time less influential, brand of
structuralism was developed by Louis Dumont (1911–99), an
Indianist and Sanskrit scholar who did fieldwork both in the
Aryan north and the Dravidian south. Dumont, closer to
Durkheim than Lévi-Strauss, argued in his major work on the
Indian caste system, Homo Hierarchicus (1969), for a holistic
perspective (as opposed to an individualistic one), claiming
that Indians (and by extension, many nonmodern peoples)
saw themselves not as ‘free individuals’ but as actors irretriev-
ably enmeshed in a web of commitments and social relations,
which in the Indian case was clearly hierarchical.
Most later, major French anthropologists have been asso-
ciated with Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, or Balandier, the Africanist
whose work in political anthropology simultaneously bridged
gaps between France and the Anglo-Saxon world and inspired
both neo-Marxist research and applied anthropology devoted
to development.
Reactions to Structural Functionalism
In Britain and her colonies, the structural functionalism now
associated chiefly with Evans-Pritchard and Fortes was under
pressure after the war. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard himself repu-
diated his former views in 1949, arguing that the search for
‘natural laws of society’ had been shown to be futile and that
anthropology should fashion itself as a humanities discipline
rather than a natural science. Retrospectively, this statement has
often been quoted as marking a shift ‘from function to
meaning’ in the discipline’s priorities; Kroeber expressed
similar views in the United States. Others found other paths
away from what was increasingly seen as a conceptual strait-
jacket. Edmund R. Leach, whose Political Systems of Highland
Burma (1954), suggested a departure from functionalist
orthodoxies, notably Radcliffe-Brown’s dictum that social
systems tend to be in equilibrium and Malinowski’s view of
myths as integrating ‘social charters,’ would later be a promoter
and critic of structuralism in Britain. Leach’s contemporary
Raymond Firth proposed a distinction between social structure
(the statuses in society) and social organization, which he saw
as the actual process of social life, whereby choice and indi-
vidual whims were related to structural constraints. Later in the
1950s and 1960s, several younger social anthropologists,
notably F.G. Bailey and Fredrik Barth, followed Firth’s lead as
well as the theory of games (a recent development in
economics) in refining an actor-centered perspective on social
life. Max Gluckman, a former student of Radcliffe-Brown and
a close associate of Evans-Pritchard, also abandoned the strong

holist program of the structural functionalists, reconceptualiz-
ing social structure as a loose set of constraints, while empha-
sizing the importance of individual actors. Gluckman’s
colleagues included several important Africanists such as A.L.
Epstein, J. Clyde Mitchell, and Elizabeth Colson. Working in
southern Africa, this group pioneered urban anthropology and
ethnicity studies in the 1950s and 1960s.
Neo-Evolutionism, Cultural Ecology, and Neo-Marxism
The number of anthropologists has always been larger in the
United States than anywhere else, and the discipline was always
diverse there. Although the influence from the Boasian cultural
relativist school remains strong, other groups of scholars have
also made their mark. From the late 1940s, a resurgent interest
in Morgan’s evolutionism led to the formulation of neo-
evolutionist and materialist research programs. Julian Steward,
a student of Robert Redfield (who had been a student of
Radcliffe-Brown), proposed a theory of cultural dynamics dis-
tinguishing between ‘the cultural core’ (basic institutions such
as the division of labor) and ‘the rest of culture’ in a way
strongly reminiscent of Marx. Steward led research projects
among Latin American peasants and North American Indians,
encouraging a focus on the relationship between culture,
technology, and the environment. Leslie White held more
deterministic materialist views, but also – perhaps oddly – saw
symbolic culture as a largely autonomous realm. Among the
major scholars influenced by White, Marvin Harris has
strengthened his materialist determinism, while Marshall D.
Sahlins in the 1960s made the move from neoevolutionism to
a symbolic anthropology influenced by structuralism.
Cultural ecology sprang from the teachings of Steward and
White, and represented a rare collaboration between anthro-
pology and biology. Especially in the 1960s, many such studies
were carried out, including, notably, Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for
the Ancestors (1968), an attempt to account for a recurrent ritual
in the New Guinean highlands in ecological terms. The upsurge
of Marxist peasant research, especially in Latin America, in the
1970s, was also clearly indebted to Steward.
The appearance of radical student politics in the late 1960s,
which had an impact on academia until the early 1980s, had
a strong, if passing, influence on anthropology. Of the more
lasting contributions, the peasant studies initiated by Steward
and furthered by Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, and others must be
mentioned, along with French attempts, represented in the very
sophisticated work of Maurice Godelier and Claude Meillas-
soux, at synthesizing Lévi-Straussian structuralism, Althusserian
Marxism, and anthropological comparison. Although Marxism
and structuralism eventually became unfashionable, scholars –
particularly those engaged in applied work – continue to draw
inspiration from Marxist thought (see Field Theory).
Symbolic and Cognitive Anthropology
More true to the Boasian legacy than the materialist approaches,
studies of cognition and symbolic systems developed and
diversified in the United States. A leading theorist was Clifford
Geertz (1926–2006), who wrote a string of influential essays
advocating hermeneutics (interpretive method) in the 1960s
and 1970s (see Hermeneutics, History of). While his originality
Anthropology, History of 769
as a theorist can be questioned, his originality as a writer is
obvious, and Geertz ranks as perhaps the finest writer of
contemporary anthropology. Marshall Sahlins is, with Geertz,
the foremost proponent of cultural relativism today, and has
published a number of important books on various subjects
(from Mauss’ theory of exchange to sociobiology and the death
of Captain Cook), consistently stressing the autonomy of the
symbolic realm, thus arguing that cultural variation cannot be
explained by recourse to ecology, technology, or biology.
In Britain, too, interest in meaning, symbols, and cognition
grew after the war, especially from the 1960s (partly due to the
belated reception of Lévi-Strauss). British anthropology had
hitherto been strongly sociological, and two important scholars
who fused the legacy from structural functionalism with the
study of symbols and meaning were Mary Douglas (1921–
2007) and Victor Turner (1920–83). Taking his cue from van
Gennep, Turner, a former associate of Gluckman, developed
a complex analysis of rituals among the Ndembu of Zambia,
showing their functionally integrating aspects, their meaning-
ful aspects for the participants, and their deeper symbolic
significance. Douglas, a student of Evans-Pritchard, famous for
her Purity and Danger (1966), analyzed the human preoccu-
pation with dirt and impurities as a way of thinking about the
boundaries of society and the nature/culture divide. Prolific
and original, Douglas is a major defender of a reformed
structural functionalism.
Against all these (and other) perspectives regarding how
‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ perceive the world, anthropologists
emphasizing the actor’s point of view have argued that no two
individuals see the world in the same way and that it is
preposterous to generalize about societies. The impact of
feminism has been decisive here. Since the 1970s, feminist
anthropologists have identified often profound differences
between male and female worldviews, indicating how classic
accounts of ‘societies’ really refer to male perspectives on them
as both the anthropologist and the main informants tended to
be male. For example, in a restudy of Trobriand society,
Annette Weiner (1976) showed that Malinowski’s famous
work was incomplete and ultimately misleading as he had
failed to observe important social processes confined to
females. Feminism also influenced anthropology by empha-
sizing the need for a critical reflexivity addressing the meth-
odological and epistemological issues arising from the
ethnographer’s identity as, for example, a man or a woman.
Anthropology and the Contemporary World
Since the pillars of modern anthropology were erected around
the World War I, the former colonies became independent,
‘natives’ got their own educated elites (including social scien-
tists), economic and cultural globalization led to the spread of
capitalism and consumer culture, and transcontinental migra-
tion blurred the boundaries between the traditional ‘us’ and
‘them.’ This situation entailed new challenges for anthropology
that were met in various ways – revealing continuities as well as
breaks with the past.
A late field to be incorporated into anthropology, but one
that became the largest single area of interest from the 1970s,
was the study of identity politics, notably ethnicity and
nationalism. Since the publication of several important texts
770 Anthropology, History of
around 1970 (by, inter alia, Barth and Abner Cohen in Europe,
and George DeVos in the United States), anthropological
ethnicity studies investigated the interrelationship between
ethnic identity and ethnic politics, and explored how notions
of cultural differences contribute to group identification. Since
the publication of several important texts on nationalism in the
early 1980s (by Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and others),
this also became an important area for anthropologists.
Ethnicity and nationalism are partly or wholly modern
phenomena associated with the state, and thus denote
a departure from the former mainstay of anthropology, the
study of nonmodern small-scale societies. While ethnicity and
(especially) nationalism could not be studied through partici-
pant observation only (other kinds of data are required), it was
evident that anthropologists who engaged in this field
remained committed to the classic tenets of the discipline;
ethnographic fieldwork, comparison, and a systemic view of
social reality. Also, the study of identity politics emerged as an
interdisciplinary field where anthropologists, sociologists,
historians, and political scientists profited from each other’s
expertise.
Other modern phenomena also received increased atten-
tion in anthropology from the 1970s, including consumption,
‘subcultures,’ wagework, and migration. The boundary between
the ‘Western self’ and the ‘non-Western other’ became blurred.
Anthropological studies of Western societies became common,
and Europe was established as an ethnographic region along
with West Africa, South Asia, and so on. Even anthropologists
working in traditional settings with classic topics increasingly
had to see their field as enmeshed, to a greater or lesser extent,
in a global system of communication and exchange.
Because of the increased penetration of the formerly tribal
world by capitalism and the state, and accompanying processes
of cultural change, there was a growing demand for a recon-
ceptualization of culture in the 1980s and 1990s, and scholars
such as Ulf Hannerz and Marilyn Strathern developed fluid
concepts of culture seeing it as less coherent, less bounded, and
less integrated than the Boasian and Malinowskian traditions
implied.
Some scholars saw the postcolonial situation as sounding
the death knell of anthropology: Since the ‘primitive’ was gone,
and the former informants were now able to identify and
describe themselves (they no longer needed anthropologists to
do it), the science of cultural variation seemed to have lost its
raison d’être. Following the lead of Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978), an influential critique of Western depictions of the
‘East,’ and often inspired by Michel Foucault, they saw
anthropology as a colonial and imperialist enterprise refusing
non-Western peoples a voice of their own and magnifying the
distance between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Especially in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, this view had many followers, some of whom
abandoned empirical research, while others tried to incorpo-
rate the autocriticism into their work. Yet others saw these
pessimistic views as largely irrelevant, since anthropology had
always been fraught with similar tensions, to which each new
generation found its solutions. In this regard, it must be
pointed out that the earlier feminist critique of anthropology,
far from repudiating the subject, led to its enriching by adding
new implements to its toolbox and new dimensions to its
worldview. The same could be said of the reconceptualizations
of culture that arguably offered an improved accuracy of
description (see Postcoloniality).
The Situation at the Turn of the Millennium
Over the course of the twentieth century, anthropology became a
varied discipline with a strong academic foothold in all conti-
nents, although its centers remained in the English- and French-
speaking countries. It was still possible to discern differences
between American cultural anthropology, British social anthro-
pology, and French ethnologie, but the discipline was more
unified than ever before – not in its views, but in its approaches.
Hardly a part of the world had not now been studied intensively
by scholars engaging in ethnographic fieldwork, but since the
world changes, new research is always called for.
Specializations proliferated, ranging from studies of eth-
nomedicine and the body to urban consumer culture, adver-
tising, and cyberspace. Although the grand theories of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries – from unilinear evolu-
tionism to structuralism – had been abandoned, new theories
claiming to provide a unified view of humanity were being
proposed; for example, new advances in evolutionary
psychology and cognitive science offered ambitious general
accounts of social life and the human mind, respectively. The
problems confronting earlier generations of anthropologists,
regarding, for example, the nature of social organization, of
knowledge, of kinship, and of myth and ritual, remained
central to the discipline although they were explored in new
empirical settings by scholars who were more specialized than
their predecessors.
Anthropology has thrived on the tension between the
particular and the universal; between the intensive study of
local life and the quest for general accounts of the human
condition. Is it chiefly a generalizing science or a discipline
devoted to the elucidation of the unique? The general answer is
that anthropologists ultimately do study society, culture, and
humanity, but that in order to do so, they must devote most of
their energies to the study of societies, cultures, and humans. As
long as their mutual differences and similarities are not fully
understood, there will be an intellectual space in the world for
anthropology or, at least, a discipline like it (see Anthropology).
See also: Anthropology: Overview; Boas, Franz (1858–1942);
Cognitive Anthropology; Colonialism, Anthropology of;
Community and Society: History of the Concepts; Darwin,
Charles Robert (1809–82); Human Behavioral Ecology;
Structuralism; Symbolism in Anthropology.
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