One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology / Edition 2 available in Hardcover
One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0226038289
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226038285
- Pub. Date:
- 05/16/2005
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226038289
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226038285
- Pub. Date:
- 05/16/2005
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology / Edition 2
Hardcover
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$99.00Overview
Moving from E. B. Taylor all the way through the development of modern fieldwork, Barth reveals the repressive tendencies that prevented Britain from developing a variety of anthropological practices until the late 1960s. Gingrich, meanwhile, articulates the development of German anthropology, paying particular attention to the Nazi period, of which surprisingly little analysis has been offered until now. Parkin then assesses the French tradition and, in particular, its separation of theory and ethnographic practice. Finally, Silverman traces the formative influence of Franz Boas, the expansion of the discipline after World War II, and the "fault lines" and promises of contemporary anthropology in the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226038285 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2005 |
| Series: | Halle Lectures |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 408 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Andre Gingrich is professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and head of the Anthropology Unit at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Robert Parkin is departmental lecturer in social anthropology at Oxford University.
Sydel Silverman is president emerita of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and professor emerita of anthropology at the City University of New York.
Read an Excerpt
One Discipline, Four Ways
British, German, French, and American Anthropology
By FREDRIK BARTH ANDRE GINGRICH ROBERT PARKIN SYDEL SILVERMAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03829-2
Chapter One
The Rise of Anthropology in Britain, 1830-1898
The field of study that became British anthropology arose on the fringes of a scholarly world that regarded other topics as far more important and interesting than the study of human social and cultural diversity. It faced an academic establishment that seems to have been most reluctant to welcome it as a bona fide discipline within the range of academic specialties worth pursuing in scholarly institutions. Under such circumstances, an account of the British tradition of anthropology cannot be restricted to an internal story of scholars wrestling each other over intellectual ideas, innovations, and orthodoxies: we must also take account of the interests and prejudices that prevailed in the larger society, to which these scholars had to accommodate, and of the particular organizations and resources in academic life that were available to them as the means of pursuing their goals.
Of course, much of British academia suffered under similar constraints. The small number of universities catered to the sons of the upper classes and were designed to provide them with a few years of culture and education before sending them on into the practical world. To the extent that curricula in the humanities looked beyond British topics, their focus was overwhelmingly on the Greco-Roman tradition, as part of a conscious effort to make that tradition foundational to British thought and civilization. Other scholarly specialties were pursued only as sidelines by the dons of these subjects or as hobbies by persons of independent income.
Inevitably, Britain's role in exploration, overseas trade, and colonial expansion during the nineteenth century led to a growing scholarly and public curiosity and interest in more global knowledge. Geography, zoology, and botany were in due course developed into the generalizing traditions of academic scholarship of the naturalists, and they produced epochal intellectual achievements, such as the theory of evolution. Similar developments did not take place in the humanities. Scholarship regarding the societies, languages, and cultures of the peoples of the growing empire and beyond its boundaries was pursued sparingly and in the particularizing mode of Orientalism, and outstanding studies such as E. W. Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) and the honorable Mountstuart Elphinstone's An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1839/1972) failed to converge into a generalizing perspective that could become anthropology. While there was a large public market for serious travel literature, travel authors looked to history and geography for their wider perspective, and the lives of "savages" did not receive much serious attention.
Instead, the field that was to become anthropology arose out of the concerns of compassionate activists who were linked to a distinctive circle in British society: that of Nonconformists and especially Quaker philanthropists. The following discussion of the emergence of British anthropology leans heavily on a detailed and perceptive article by George W. Stocking Jr. on the origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1971). For a rich and detailed account of the whole period, see Stocking 1987.
Political figures among the Nonconformist and Quaker activists led the campaign against the African slave trade and the legality of the institution of slavery in the British colonies. When the abolition of slavery was achieved in 1833, this same group took up the situation of native populations in South Africa by spearheading the establishment of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines and subsequently forming the Aborigines Protection Society, with the motto ab uno sanguine-"of one blood." The goals of the society arose from the gross disparity its founders saw between Britons' behavior at home and their behavior overseas, that is, between the devotion to civil freedom and moral and intellectual improvement in England, and the "injuries we have inflicted, the oppression we have exercised, the cruelties we have committed, the vices we have fostered, the desolation and utter ruin we have caused" in colonial areas (Aborigines Protection Society 1837).
The Aborigines Protection Society provided the first forum for discussions and publications in which "authentic information concerning the character, habits and wants of the uncivilized tribes" (Aborigines Protection Society 1837, 4) was compiled and systematized, and thus the first point of growth for an anthropological perspective. Though the members shared the humanitarian sentiments, tensions emerged between those more strongly committed to evangelism as the self-evident course for the betterment of aborigines, and those who would give greater priority to the task of studying the aboriginal populations. This soon led to the separate establishment in 1844 of the Ethnological Society of London, with a full-fledged scholarly program to "inquire into distinguishing characteristics, physical and moral, of the varieties of Mankind which inhabit, or have inhabited, the Earth [and] ascertain the causes of such characteristics."
Though its membership was miniscule (it had declined to thirty-eight paying members by 1858); the society became a very contentious arena. Its core constituency was led by Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866) and James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848), both Quakers who claimed as the premise for their moral and philosophical position the unity of blood embracing all of humankind, and who favored as the explanation for human diversity the effects of environmental differences. Others, both within and outside of the society, focused more on the anatomical differences between racial groups, and, influenced by some contemporary currents in French and German thought, they argued for the "diversitarian," that is, polygenistic, character of mankind and regarded racial differences as the cause of human cultural and moral diversity.
This diversitarian position was favored by James Hunt (1833-1869), a mercurial speech therapist who was made secretary of the society in 1860. Hunt pursued his racist views with energy and rancor, and in 1863 he broke out with his faction to found the separate Anthropological Society of London. Having articulated their diversitarian position before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, these anthropologists shortly found themselves in opposition both to the humanitarian ethnologists and to the new Darwinians, who conceived of a single origin for the human species. Within two years, Hunt claimed more than five hundred members for his new anthropological society and had embarked on a career in which he pursued his polemics; cultivated flamboyant and notorious public figures like Sir Richard Burton, the scholar-explorer of African and Arabian fame and translator of sexually explicit Oriental texts; and formed a dinner circle with his partisans under the name The Cannibal Club. Through such antics, Hunt brought about an improbable alliance between the humanitarian ethnologists and the Darwinians, but it was touch and go whether he or they would prevail until 1871, when the alliance was victorious under the leadership of Thomas Huxley-and then only because of Huxley's adroit maneuver of co-opting the term anthropology and incorporating it into the name of the unified organization, now called the Royal Anthropological Institute.
The significance of this contorted microhistory should not be underestimated. Through it the humanitarian ideology of the founders of the antislavery movement and the Aborigines Protection Society and the premise of the unity of humankind were made foundational to the emerging discipline of anthropology; racist explanations of cultural differences had become compromised. Though not sufficient to secure a total and definitive rejection of racist ideas, James Hunt's excesses were long remembered in the Royal Anthropological Institute.
The scholarly achievements of this early generation of ethnologists were insignificant, but their ideology and perspective provided an enduring platform for British anthropology through their articulation by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). Tylor, the son of a Quaker businessman, was of the same class and ideology as the founders of the Ethnological Society of London. Because he had symptoms of consumption when he was a young man, Tylor was given a modest life pension by his family and was thus free to travel and study, joining the ranks of other enlightened amateurs and scholars. To improve his health he traveled extensively for a while in Mexico, where he was impressed by the cultural richness of native civilization. On his return to England he read widely and assimilated the many new impulses circulating in English intellectual life at the time, and he published an account of his Mexican travels. In 1862 he started to attend the meetings of the Ethnological Society, which drew archaeologists as well as ethnographers. Struck by the parallels between the tools of "savages" and the lithic industries that were being unearthed in Europe, and influenced by the surrounding climate of social evolutionary thought predating Darwin, members of the society speculated on the resemblance between contemporary "savages" and the lost races of primitive humanity. From this emerged a vision of the potential and global importance of systematic scholarship on "savages" that gave early anthropology as a discipline its defining topic.
With a small handful of likeminded scholars, Tylor proceeded to work out the issues and concepts for the new discipline and gave them a coherent formulation in his influential Primitive Culture (1871). Of greatest importance was his explicit premise of "the psychic unity of man"-a felicitously polysemous transformation of the ethnologists' abolitionist and humanitarian commitment to the equality and moral value of all of humankind. It introduced into anthropology a relativism with which to temper Victorian ethnocentrism.
In Tylor's hands the premise of psychic unity was the key to a reconstruction of the reflections that may have led primitive humans and contemporary "savage" people to develop the beliefs and insights they embraced. In the formulation of Andrew Lang, Tylor's junior and associate, the customs of other peoples could be seen as the product of reason like our own, working with knowledge imperfectly apprehended, and under stress of needs that it was the scholar's task to discover. Tylor saw this panhuman reasoning capacity as the motor that could generate the gradual change and overall progress he observed in human history. Finally, the premise of psychic unity may have fixed in anthropological thought the expectation of intellectual accessibility and resonance between anthropological scholars and "savage" populations that was later to come to fruition in the practices of participant fieldwork.
On this philosophical basis Tylor proceeded to specify the anthropologist's object: culture. "Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is 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, 2:1). This definition provided the foundations for the work of the first generation of British anthropologists.
Tylor sought to lay out a number of explicit methodological concerns. The first step in the study of civilization, he stated, requires that one fragment culture into its details and then classify these into their proper groups; this was an analytical procedure for comparative work. But what kind of elements should the scholar divide the object into? The "proper groups" Tylor envisaged had to do with uses and implicit functions. His was an apparently circular operation whereby the culture that was defined as an assemblage of institutions and customs was again disassembled into elements like those that composed the definition.
Only by establishing these groups, Tylor argued, is the scholar able to compare like with like and thus identify variations in cultural forms. To make sense of this claim, one clearly needs to introduce a premise that remains unstated: that the culture one analyzes in each particular case is a manifestation found in a particular place; it represents what is acquired by man as a member of a local society. The diffuse singular of culture and society in Tylor's definition facilitated his synthetic and evolutionary vision of human history, but it mystifies somewhat Tylor's ethnological ambition, which hinged on "adhesions" and "survivals" in particular local cultures. Thus Tylor's next step was to invite the analyst to search for adhesions in the properly classified materials-a discovery procedure to find empirical linkages between distinct cultural features that go together in the sense of regularly forming a syndrome in their local co-occurrences among peoples. But Tylor's concept of culture lacks clarity on the issue of the possible nature of linkage and integration among the different elements of culture, as on the question of cultural or social entities and boundaries. Lacking such perspectives, Tylor and his contemporaries felt unconstrained by any idea of structure and would compare cultural features or traits without reference to their context.
Discovering adherences or linkages was a step of analysis for which Tylor used global data, most famously in comparative tables showing the presence or absence of various institutions and customs among 350 different peoples. Tylor saw the empirical linkages as evidence of either general laws of human reason and association, or particular historical connections. These two alternative explanatory frames have persisted in the guise of "independent invention" and "diffusion" in the distributional studies of cultural anthropologists for almost one hundred years.
Finally, Tylor sought to bring order to the analysis of culture by means of his concept of "survivals," cultural features that were once useful and reasonable but have since persisted beyond their time through human habit or inertia. Thus many customs and superstitions of European peasants could be understood as evidence of past culture, just as the culture of surviving groups of supposedly less developed races could provide evidence of the prehistoric culture of primitive people-evidence from which the evolutionary stages of culture could be discovered.
Tylor's main substantive interest was in the sources and evolution of religious beliefs. Having lost his Quaker faith, he wished to demonstrate that religious belief did not arise from divine revelation, but was the product of people's own efforts to understand and explain the world. For this purpose comparative materials from earlier stages of cultural evolution were of particular value. As Tylor wrote in a flippant moment: "Theologians all to expose-/ 'Tis the mission of Primitive Man." He developed the concept of animism to describe the earliest and most basic form of religion, explaining that it arose from the "crude but reasonable" primitive idea that other bodies were animated by a life analogous to one's own, which extended to lower animals, trees, and even material objects. Two further sources of reflection by primitive man would be dreams and the sudden departure of life at death, spawning ideas of a ghost/soul. A wide range of reported ethnographic evidence was interpreted in these terms, and a logical sequence leading from the first inklings of animism to fully developed monotheistic religions was constructed.
Other scholars, working with similar speculative methods, pursued other paths. John F. McLennan (1827-1881), a Scottish lawyer, focused on the evolution of marriage and also developed a theory of how rituals arose from survivals. Thus, for example, the ceremonial enactment of bride capture as part of the marriage ritual-as was reported from various parts of the world-reflected a former practice under primitive conditions of indeed obtaining wives by capturing them. His Primitive Marriage (1865) laid out a scheme of development from primitive promiscuity, through group marriage and polygamy, to monogamy, and sought to construct by logic and functional reasoning a plausible stepwise course of such a development. Others, such as Andrew Lang (1844-1912), a classical scholar who supported himself by writing for the educated public, delved into interpretations of folklore and myth with similar method and purpose. The most famous of them all was no doubt Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), a classical scholar who held a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and spent his life compiling and abridging his thirteen-volume study of magic and religion named The Golden Bough.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One Discipline, Four Ways by FREDRIK BARTH ANDRE GINGRICH ROBERT PARKIN SYDEL SILVERMAN Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Chris HannBritain and the Commonwealth by Fredrik Barth
1. The Rise of Anthropology in Britain, 1830-1898
2. From the Torres Straits to the Argonauts, 1898-1922
3. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, 1920-1945
4. The Golden Age, 1945-1970
5. Enduring Legacies of the British Tradition
The German-Speaking Countries by Andre Gingrich
1. Prelude and Overture: From Early Travelogues to German Enlightenment
2. From the Nationalist Birth of Volkskunde to the Establishment of Academic Diffusionism: Branching Off from the International Mainstream
3. From the Late Imperial Era to the End of the Republican Interlude: Creative Subaltern Tendencies, Larger and Smaller Schools of Anthropology
4. German Anthropology during the Nazi Period: Complex Scenarios of Collaboration, Persecution, and Competition
5. Anthropology in Four German-Speaking Countries: Key Elements of Post-World War II Developments to 1989
The French-Speaking Countries by Robert Parkin
1. Pre-Durkheimian Origins
2. Durkheim and His Era
3. Mauss, Other Durkheimians, and Interwar Developments
4. Structuralism and Marxism
5. Practice, Hierarchy, and Postmodernism
The United States by Sydel Silverman
1. The Boasians and the Invention of Cultural Anthropology
2. Postwar Expansion, Materialisms, and Mentalisms
3. Bringing Anthropology into the Modern World
4. Rebellions and Reinventions
5. American Anthropology at the End of the Century
References
Index