Beyond the End of Anthropology

chapter 4 Beyond the End of Anthropology

Is the discipline that brought us knowledge of the kula ring and the mother’s brother slated for extinction? Has the labor of Morgan and Malinowski been for nought?1 Stanley Barrett … Whenever the end of anthropology has been proclaimed from within there has been a renewal of both external interest and internal theoretical energy.2 Michael Herzfeld ∵

Anthropology has been an apocalyptic academic field ever since Tylor’s revela- tion that culture is a complex whole cemented by the psychic unity of humanity. Like its older sibling, sociology, it evolved to make sense of what it means to be human without a literal Adam and Eve as parents.3 But the subject matter of all human diversity, up from the apes in a global sense, had a time-sensitive half-life from the very start. Those early social evolutionists who saw in “primitive cultures” a comparative resource for uncovering the past were well aware that progress would eventually deprive them of their workshop. Tylor and Boas urged their students to study exotic others before they melded into the rapid- ly expanding modernity of the West. Malinowski’s ground-defining fieldwork among the Trobrianders was also the start of a salvage operation. Even when new tribes were found, the missionaries usually got there first, as Margaret

1 Barrett (1984:211). 2 Herzfeld (2000:5). 3 Although sociology and anthropology evolved as distinct disciplines in the university, they share methods and theoretical approaches. There is room in the world of scholarship for both disciplines to continue. As Bernard (2002:3) explains, “In fact, the differences within anthropology and sociology with regard to methods are more important than the difference between those disciplines.”

Mead discovered for her own coming of age in Samoa. Over a century ago, when Alfred Kroeber greeted the last native Yahi, a man whose name he would never know, in the new Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, museums had already become the mausoleums of primitive humanity.4 Critics of anthropology at times characterize the discipline as suffering from an “anthropological imperialism that would encase cultures in a permafrost.”5 In this sense the ethnographer becomes both the antithesis of the missionary, in not wanting to convert the native, and at the same time an academically inclined Luddite unwilling to civilize the native with the benefits of modernity. There is a misperception here about the nature of cultural change. No anthropologist has ever studied a totally isolated “primitive,” if such were to be found in the last century or so. Malinowski recognized this early on, noting “Just now, when the methods and aims of scientific field ethnology have taken shape, when men fully trained for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants – these die away under our very eyes.”6 All ethnography in the modern sense has been salvage work. Ethnographers have often been concerned about protecting the people they study from the dangers imposed from without, but the emphasis has almost always been on promoting self-determination rather than creating an isolated human zoo. Although anthropology has invariably been associated with the study of “primitive” peoples, the broader focus has always been on working out the details of all human diversity, past and present. Robert Lowie’s sentiment, presenting “culture” to the public in 1917, noted that ethnology was concerned with “cruder cultures of peoples” for practical reasons. But he then argued that such an exclusive focus was “illogical and artificial,” since the anthropologist “might examine and describe the usages of modern America as well as those of the Hopi Indians.”7 And ethnographers did begin to study Western societies in earnest, including pioneers such as Nora Zeale Hurston, who studied with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia in the 1920s. Her work on African Americans in the South and in the Caribbean has at times been styled as “folklore,” but it was based on participant observation and the same training that her fellow student Margaret Mead had received. Before the end of the second World War American anthropologists received Ph.D.s for ethnographic study at home of rural farmers, New Deal projects, Jewish intermar- riage and community studies in America.8

4 The story of Kroeber’s ethnographic remake of Ishi is told in a widely read text by Theodora Kroeber (2002), originally published in 1961. 5 Harrison (2000:xxvii). 6 Malinowski (1922:xv). 7 Lowie (1917:6). 8 See Lewis (2014:11–12) for more details on these studies.