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Notes and References NOTES AND REFERENCES PREFACE 1 In the period of history covered by the present work, the words most commonly used to describe the type of society studied by anthropologists were "primitive" and "savage". Since however, neither of these words can be used without strongly pejorative overtones, I have done my best to avoid them, substituting instead more emotionally neutral words like "aboriginal", "indigenous" and "preliterate". None of these words is perfectly suited to the job at hand and the result may sometimes come out sounding rather oddly. Nonetheless, I would rather be guilty of minor offences of usage than of encouraging Eurocentric prejudice. 2 Peter Lawrence, "The Ethnographic Revolution", Oceanill45, 253-271 (1975). 3 A recent work which makes a start in this direction is Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines, Gerard Lemaine, Roy MacLeod, Michael Mulkay and Peter Weingart (eds.), (The Hague and Chicago, 1977). From our point of view the most inter­ esting contribution is Michael Worboy's study of British tropical medicine, a discipline which, largely because of its relationship to British imperialism, exhibited a maturation process which bore many similarities to that of British Social Anthropology. 4 Jairus Banaji, ''The Crisis of British Social Anthropology", New Left Review 64, 75 (Nov.-Dec. 1970). 5 E. E. Evans-Pritchard's famous 1940 ethnography on The Nuer, for example, often regarded as the ultimate achievement of British Social Anthropology, presents the Nuer as a self-contained, static and harmoniously-operating group. However, it is evident from a number of things which Evans-Pritchard mentions in passing that, in fact, the Nuer interact so substantially with the neighbouring Dinka people that, instead of reifying "the Nuer" as a self-contained social entity, it may well have been more sensible to write a book about the Nuer-Dinka complex. Moreover, it also seems apparent from things he lets slip about Arab incursions into Nuerland, and the impact of Anglo-Egyptian colonialism, that the society may be undergoing permanent undirectional changes, and may embody elements which are essentially dysfunctional. 6 Mead was at one stage married. to Reo Fortune and, later, to Gregory Bateson. For a not-very-revealing account of these relationships and a retrospective look at her early work in cultural and social anthropology, see her autobiography, Blackbe"y Winter (New York, 1972). It must not be imagined, however, that all was roses between Mead and British anthropologists generally. As one of my referees wrote in response to an earlier draft of the present work, "She certainly hated and was warmly hated in turn by the majority of British Social Anthropologists of whom the outstanding instance was E. E. Evans-Pritchard. I knew Mead and at one point when I taught in England discussed this with her and it was people like Firth and the humane Fortes whom she could abide, if not feel intellectually warm toward." 329 330 NOTES AND REFERENCES 7 Malinowski, article on "Culture" from the 1931 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, p. 625. Quoted in Gregory Bateson,Naven (2nd edn., Stanford,1958), p. 27. 8 Meyer Fortes has objected strenuously to my use of this phrase in such a context. However, I can see absolutely no reason why a phrase which social anthropologists themselves use in a wide variety of contexts should not be applied to the discipline itself. After all, for most young anthropologists, intensive fieldwork is (inter alia) an ordeal which must be gone through before their senior colleagues will regard them as having crossed the threshold into the profession. Or perhaps Professor Fortes thinks that social anthropologists are beyond the pale of human society? 9 J. H. M. Beattie, "Kinship and Social Anthropology", Man 64,102 (1964); P. Rigby, Cattle and Kinship Among the Gogo (Cornell, 1969), p. 298 n. 10 Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage (penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 10. 11 M. Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order (Chicago, 1969), p. 12. 12 J. G. Frazer, "William Robertson Smith", in The Gorgon's Head And Other Literary Pieces (London, 1927), pp. 286, 287. The piece on Robertson Smith was originally published in 1894. 13 Barbara Freire-Marreco and John Linton Myres (eds.), Notes and Queries on Anthro­ pology (4th edn., London, 1912), p. 250. 14 Ibid., pp. 252, 254. 15 Ibid., p. 255. 16 Ibid., pp. 254,255. 17 Fortes, op. cit. (note 11), p. 219. 18 Ibid., p. 13. 19 An excellent introduction to Stocking's work is provided by the collection of his papers entitled Race, Culture and Evolution (Free Press, New York, 1968). 20 Ibid., p. 157. 21 I am not alone in using the word "school" to refer to the anthropological movement which emanated from Cambridge University. Meyer Fortes, for example, uses the word with a capital "s" in his Social Anthropology at Cambridge since 1900 (Cambridge, 1953), pp. 16, 18,45. See also G. Elliot Smith,letter to the editor of The Times Literary Supplement of 7 Oct. 1926; and C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, 1967), p. 158. 22 A book which, like mine, attempts to give a realistic account of a specific British academic movement is Ernest Gellner's Words and Things (pelican, Harmondsworth, 1968), which represents a critique of "Linguistic Philosophy". While the book is very amusing and in many ways informative, and while Gellner claims to be giving both a "logical" and "sociological" account of the movement (p. 18), it happens to be a fact that, as Gellner remarks, "the logic of the ideas [in Linguistic Philosophy] is in a sense also the sociology of the movement" (p. 179). For this reason the book is a lot less sociologicaiIy informative than one might have hoped. Nonetheless, for anyone inter­ ested in the dynamics of small, inbred intellectual movements, it might be an interesting exercise to read Gellner's book in parallel with mine. 23 Thomas S. Kuhn, "Reflections on My Critics", in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, fust published 1970, reprinted with corrections 1974), pp. 237,238. 24 Ibid., pp. 245-247,254. 25 Ibid., p. 6. CHAPTER I 331 26 In his Anthropologists and Anthropology (peregrine, 1975), for example, Adam Kuper uses 1922 as the "baseline" for his book, primarily because this was the year in which Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown published their fIrst major fIeld-studies, and secondarily because this was also the year in which Rivers, "the greatest fIgure in the pre-functionalist generation", died. Kuper in fact goes so far as to say that 1922 was "the annus mirabilis of functionalism", and that when Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown set British Social Anthropology going, "they had all the lonely certainty of prophets and seers" (pp. 9, 10). CHAPTER I 1 See for example Colin Rosser and Christopher Harris, The Family and Social Change. A Study of Family and Kinship in a South Wales Town (London, 1965). 2 See for example Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigr, Wars and Witches. The Riddles of Culture (Glasgow, 1977). The entire book is relevant to the issue of aboriginal pragmatism, although an excellent sample of Harris's approach may be obtained from the section entitled "Mother Cow". 3 LeslieA. White, "How Morgan Came to Write Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity", Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 42 (1957). Carl Resek, Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar (Chicago, 1960). 4 Quoted in Resek, ibid., p. 26. 5 Quoted in Resek, ibid., p. 36. 6 Quoted in White, op. cit. (note 3), p. 262. 7 Ibid., pp. 262, 263. 8 Resek, op. cit. (note 3), p. 78. 9 Ibid., p. 97 ff. 10 c.f. M. Harris, The Rise ofAnthropological Theory (New York, 1968), p. 185. 11 Resek, op. cit. (note 3), p. 98. 12 Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (London, 1877), p. 62. 13 American [Whig] Review 5 186 (1847). The same sentence occurs in Morgan's League of the Iroquois, (1962 Corinth Books reprint of original 1851 edn.), p. 82. 14 See, for example, the first few pages of Chapter IV. 15 A more detailed and technical discussion of classifIcatory kinship systems, in which ten "indicative features" are listed may be found in Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity . .. (Washington, 1870), pp. 155-161. 16 W. H. R. Rivers, Kinship and Social Organization (London, 1914), pp. 4,5. 17 J. G. Frazer, Introduction to R. R. Marett and T. K. Penniman (eds.), Spencer's Last Joumey (Oxford, 1931), p. 9. 18 Robin Fox, Kinship and Marriage (penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 260. 19 Ibid. Fox's account is written against the background of extensive debates, which occurred during the iust half of the present century, about whether or not certain aboriginal peoples recognize a connection between copulation and pregnancy. For a polemical modem discussion of some of the issues involved in these debates, see Edmund Leach, "Virgin Birth", Proc. Roy. Anthrop. Instit. 1966, pp. 39-49. For a comprehen­ sive general review of the debates up until 1936 , see M. F. Ashley Montagu, Coming into Being Among the Australian Aborigines (London, 1937), Chaps. 1-10. 332 NOTES AND REFERENCES 20 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, "On Social Structure", original 1940, reprinted in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (New York, Free Press edn., 1965), p. 203. 21 F. Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (reprint of 4th edn., Moscow, 1952), p. 13. See also pp. 30-32. 22 Specifically J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, Andrew Lang and, to a lesser extent, E. B. Tylor, were perceived as hostile. Bernard J. Stern (ed.), "Selections from the Letters of Lorimer Fison and A.
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