A History of Anthropology

Finn Sivert Nielsen, Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Description

This is a thoroughly updated and revised edition of a popular classic of modern anthropology. The authors provide summaries of 'Enlightenment', 'Romantic' and 'Victorian' anthropology, from the cultural theories of Morgan and Taylor to the often neglected contributions of German scholars. The ambiguous relationship between anthropology and national cultures is also considered.



The book provides an unparalleled account of theoretical developments in anthropology from the 1920s to the present, including functionalism, structuralism, hermeneutics, neo-Marxism and discourse analysis. There are brief biographies of major anthropologists and coverage of key debates including totemism, kinship and globalisation.



This essential text on anthropology is highly engaging, authoritative and suitable for students at all levels.
Series preface

Preface

1. Proto-Anthropology

Introduction

Herodotus and other Greeks

After Antiquity

The European Conquests and their Impact

Why All This is not Quite Anthropology Yet

The Enlightenment

Romanticism

2. Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman

Introduction

Evolutionism and Cultural History

Morgan

Marx

Bastian and the German Tradition

Tylor and Other Victorians

The Golden Bough and the Torres Expedition

German Diffusionism

The New Sociology

Durkheim

Weber

3. Four Founding Fathers

Introduction

The Founding Fathers and their Projects

Malinowski and the Trobriand Islanders

Radcliffe-Brown's Natural Science of Society

Boas and Historical Particularism

Mauss and the Total Social Prestation

Anthropology in 1930: Parallels and Divergences

4. Expansion and Institutionalisation

Introduction

A Marginal Discipline?

Oxford and LSE, Columbia and Chicago

The Dakar-Djibouti Expedition

Culture and Personality

Cultural History

Ethnolinguistics

The Chicago School

'Kinshipology'

Functionalism's Last Stand

Some British Outsiders

5. Forms of Change

Introduction

Neo-evolutionism and Cultural Ecology

Formalism and Substativism

Methodological Individualists at Cambridge

Role Analysis and System Theory

6. The Power of Symbols

Introduction

From Function to Meaning

Ethnoscience and Symbolic Anthropology

Geertz and Schneider

Levi-Strauss and Structuralism

Early Impact

The State of the Art in 1968

7. Questioning Authority

Introduction

The Return of Marx

Structural Marxism

The Not-Quite-Marxists

Political Economy and the Capitalist World System

Feminism and the Birth of Reflexive Fieldwork

Ethnicity

Practice Theory

The Sociobiology Debate and Samoa

8. The End of Modernism?

Introduction

The End of Modernism?

The Postcolonial World

A New Departure or a Return to Boas?

Other Positions

9. Global Networks

Introduction

Towards an International Anthropology?

Trends for the Future

Biology and Culture

Globalisation and the Production of Locality

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Lewis H. Morgan
• Edward Burnett Tylor
• Structuralism
• History of science
• Colonialism
• Anthropology
• Social
• Culture
• Lewis Henry Morgan
• Edward Tylor

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849649186
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

A History of Anthropology

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors: Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University and Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex

Published titles include:

Claiming Individuality: The Cultural Politics of Distinction E DITEDBY V ERED A MITAND N OEL D YCK

Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Human Commonality V ERED A MITAND N IGEL R APPORT

Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City L ESLIE J. B ANK

In Foreign Fields: The Politics and Experiences of Transnational Sport Migration T HOMAS F. C ARTER

On the Game: Women and Sex Work S OPHIE D AY

Slave of Allah: Zacarias Moussaoui vs the USA K ATHERINE C. D ONAHUE

A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives on Human Security E DITEDBY T HOMAS E RIKSEN , E LLEN B ALAND O SCAR S ALEMINK

A History of Anthropology T HOMAS H YLLAND E RIKSENAND F INN S IVERT N IELSEN

Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives Third Edition T HOMAS H YLLAND E RIKSEN

Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology E DITEDBY T HOMAS H YLLAND E RIKSEN

Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology Third Edition T HOMAS H YLLAND E RIKSEN

What Is Anthropology? T HOMAS H YLLAND E RIKSEN

Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh K ATY G ARDNER

Anthropology, Development and the PostModern Challenge K ATY G ARDNERAND D AVID L EWIS

Border Watch: Cultures of Immigration, Detention and Control A LEXANDRA H ALL

Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives E DITEDBY D IETER H ALLERAND C RIS S HORE

Anthropology’s World: Life in a TwentyFirst Century Discipline U LF H ANNERZ

Humans and Other Animals Crosscultural Perspectives on Human–Animal Interactions S AMANTHA H URN

Culture and WellBeing: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics E DITEDBY A LBERTO C ORSÍN J IMÉNEZ

State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives E DITEDBY C HRISTIAN K ROHN  H ANSENAND K NUT G. N USTAD

Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader E DITEDBY U LI L INKEAND D ANIELLE T AANA S MITH

Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: Coffee in Costa Rica P ETER L UETCHFORD

The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy M ARIANNE M AECKELBERGH

The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development E DITEDBY D AVID M OSSEAND D AVID L EWIS

Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice D AVID M OSSE

Contesting Publics Feminism, Activism, Ethnography L YNNE P HILLIPSAND S ALLY C OLE

Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable E DITEDBY A NDREW S TRATHERN , P AMELA J. S TEWARTAND N EIL L. W HITEHEAD

Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production M ARUŠKA S VAŠEK

Race and Ethnicity in Latin America Second Edition P ETER W ADE

Race and Sex in Latin America P ETER W ADE

The Capability of Places: Methods for Modelling Community Response to Intrusion and Change S ANDRA W ALLMAN

Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA E DITEDBY D USTIN M. W AX

Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka M ARK P. W HITAKER

A HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Second Edition

Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen

First published 2001 by Pluto Press. Second edition published 2013 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright © Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen 2001, 2013

The right of Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3353 3 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3352 6 Paperback ISBN 978 1 8496 4918 6 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4920 9 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4919 3 EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

Contents

Series Preface Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition

1.ProtoAnthropology Herodotus and other Greeks 1; After Antiquity 3; The European conquests and their impact 6; Why all this is not quite anthropology yet 10; The Enlightenment 11; Romanticism 15

2.Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman Evolutionism and cultural history 21; Morgan 23; Marx 25; Bastian and the German tradition 27; Tylor and other Victorians 29;The Golden Boughand the Torres expedition 32; German diffusionism 35; The new sociology 38; Durkheim 39; Weber 41

3.Four Founding Fathers The founding fathers and their projects 49; Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders 52; RadcliffeBrown and the ‘natural science of society’ 55; Boas and historical particularism 58; Mauss and the total social prestation 61; Anthropology in 1930: parallels and divergences 64

4.Expansion and Institutionalisation A marginal discipline? 69; Oxford and the LSE, Columbia and Chicago 72; The DakarDjibouti expedition 74; Culture and personality 77; Cultural history 80; Ethnolinguistics 82; The Chicago school 83; ‘Kinshipology’ 86; Functionalism’s last stand 90; Some British outsiders 92

5.Forms of Change Neoevolutionism and cultural ecology 99; Formalism and substantivism 104; The Manchester school 107; Methodological individualists at Cambridge 112; Role analysis and system theory 117

6.The Power of Symbols From function to meaning 121; Ethnoscience and symbolic anthropology 125; Geertz and Schneider 127; LéviStrauss and structuralism 130; Early impact 133; The state of the art in 1968 135

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vi HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY A

7.Questioning Authority 138 The return of Marx 139; Structural Marxism 141; The notquite Marxists 145; Political economy and the capitalist world system 147; Feminism and the birth of reflexive fieldwork 151; Ethnicity 155; Practice theory 158; The sociobiology debate and Samoa 161

8.The End of Modernism? The end of modernism? 171; The postcolonial world 176; A new departure or a return to Boas? 179; Other positions 184

9.Global Networks Towards an international anthropology? 194; Trends for the future 200; Biology and culture 203; Globalisation and the production of locality 211

Bibliography Index

166

192

221 239

Series Preface

Anthropology is a discipline based upon indepth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume from the series:large issuesexplored insmall places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an oldstyle descriptive ethnography that is strongly areastudies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research. We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?’ rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues,set in(relatively) small place, rather than a detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study invillages.’ By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays. We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world.

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Professor Vered Amit Dr Jon P. Mitchell

Preface to the Second Edition

It would not be correct to claim that anthropology has changed dramatically in the twelve years that have passed since the publication of the first edition of this book. However, there are several reasons why we felt that a thorough revision and update was in order by now. First, the nonmetropolitan anthropologies – from Brazil to Russia, from Japan to India – were treated cursorily and somewhat superficially in the first edition. This has now, at least to the best of our abilities, been rectified. Recent scholarship on ‘other people’s anthropologies’ has been of great help here. Second, there were a number of small errors, inaccuracies and ambiguities scattered around in the first edition. We cannot guarantee that they are all gone, but again, we have done our best. Third, there have in fact been some slight changes or adjustments in the course that anthropology has been taking in the last few years. For example, the field of globalisation studies, an incipient and slightly naughty trend in the 1990s – naughty because it eschewed an assumed orthodoxy seeing anthropology as the study of small, fairly isolated societies – has grown into maturity. Few anthropolo gists today see problems in studying the relationship between the global and the local, and most do, in one way or another. Fourth, as a matter of fact, the early chapters have been revised and modified just as much as the latter ones. Indeed it may be said that the remote past has changed just as rapidly as the recent past. Partly we see the past in a different light because of recent changes; partly new research and a deepened understanding reveals new details and formerly ignored patterns. It is not true, in other words, that the past is safe and immune to change since what has happened has happened. As anthropolo gists interested in history have shown time and again, the past is something malleable and dynamic. Each generation has its own past. This is our anthropological past.

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Thomas Hylland Eriksen Finn Sivert Nielsen Oslo, November 2012

Preface to the First Edition

This is an ambitious book, but not a pretentious one. It is ambitious in that it tries, within the space of relatively few pages, to make sense of the diverse history of anthropology. Our priorities, omissions and interpretations are bound to be contested, since there can be no single authoritative history of anything, least of all a sprawling, dynamic and disputed field like anthropology. Still, the book is unpretentious, since our aim throughout has been to offer a sober and balanced account of the historical growth of anthropology as a discipline, not to propose a radical reinterpretation of it. There exists a growing scholarly literature on the history of anthropology, which this textbook does not try to compete with. Nevertheless, we know of no existing book with exactly the same scope as this one. The scholarly literature is often specialised, and existing textbooks on anthropological history are either more theoretically oriented or more committed to one or a few professional traditions. Although we may not always have succeeded, we have strived to give an impression of the parallel, convergent and interdependent developments of all major traditions in social and cultural anthropology. The book is chronologically ordered. Beginning with the ‘proto anthropologies’ from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, it continues with the creation of academic anthropology and the growth of classical sociology during the nineteenth century. The third chapter concentrates on the four men who, by general consensus, are considered the founding fathers of twentiethcentury anthropology, and the fourth chapter indicates how their work was continued, and diversified, by their students. The fifth and sixth chapters both deal with the same period – from about 1946 to about 1968, but concentrate on different trends: Chapter 5 discusses the theoretical controversies surrounding concepts of society and social integration, while Chapter 6 covers concepts of culture and symbolic meaning. In Chapter 7, the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s are presented, with emphasis on the impulses emanating from Marxism and feminism. Chapter 8 deals with the 1980s, concentrating on the postmodernist movement and its close cousin, postcolonialism, two critical trends, which seriously

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