A History of Anthropology Eriksen HOA3 00 pre 1 16/04/2013 16:04 Anthropology, Culture and Society Series Editors: Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University and Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex Published titles include: Claiming Individuality: Discordant Development: The Aid Effect: The Cultural Politics of Global Capitalism and the Giving and Governing in Distinction Struggle for Connection in International Development EDITED BY VERED AMIT AND Bangladesh EDITED BY DavID MOSSE AND NOEL DYCK KATY GARDNER DavID LEWIS Community, Cosmopolitanism Anthropology, Development Cultivating Development: and the Problem of Human and the Post-Modern An Ethnography of Aid Policy Commonality Challenge and Practice VERED AMIT AND KATY GARDNER AND DavID MOSSE NIGEL RAPPORT DavID LEWIS Contesting Publics Home Spaces, Street Styles: Border Watch: Feminism, Activism, Contesting Power and Identity Cultures of Immigration, Ethnography in a South African City Detention and Control LYNNE PHILLIPS AND SALLY COLE LESLIE J. BANK ALEXANDRA HALL Terror and Violence: In Foreign Fields: Corruption: Imagination and the The Politics and Experiences Anthropological Perspectives Unimaginable of Transnational Sport EDITED BY DIETER HALLER AND EDITED BY ANDREW STRATHERN, Migration CRIS SHORE PAMELA J. STEWART AND THOMAS F. CARTER Anthropology’s World: NEIL L. WHITEHEAD On the Game: Life in a Twenty-First Century Anthropology, Art and Women and Sex Work Discipline Cultural Production SOPHIE DAY ULF HANNERZ MAruškA SvašEK Slave of Allah: Humans and Other Animals Race and Ethnicity in Latin Zacarias Moussaoui vs the Cross-cultural Perspectives on America USA Human–Animal Interactions Second Edition KATHERINE C. DONAHUE SAMANTHA HURN PETER WADE A World of Insecurity: Culture and Well-Being: Race and Sex in Latin America Anthropological Perspectives Anthropological Approaches PETER WADE on Human Security to Freedom and Political The Capability of Places: EDITED BY THOMAS ERIKSEN, Ethics Methods for Modelling ELLEN BAL AND OSCAR SALEMINK EDITED BY ALBERTO CORSÍN Community Response to A History of Anthropology JIMÉNEZ Intrusion and Change THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN AND State Formation: SANDRA WALLMAN FINN SIVERT NIELSEN Anthropological Perspectives Anthropology at the Dawn of Ethnicity and Nationalism: EDITED BY CHRISTIAN KROHN- the Cold War: Anthropological Perspectives HANSEN AND KNUT G. NUSTAD The Influence of Foundations, Third Edition Cultures of Fear: McCarthyism and the CIA THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN A Critical Reader EDITED BY DUSTIN M. WAX Globalisation: EDITED BY ULI LINKE AND Learning Politics from Studies in Anthropology DANIELLE TAANA SMITH Sivaram: EDITED BY THOMAS HYLLAND Fair Trade and a Global The Life and Death of a ERIKSEN Commodity: Revolutionary Tamil Journalist Small Places, Large Issues: Coffee in Costa Rica in Sri Lanka An Introduction to Social and PETER LUETCHFORD MARK P. WHITAKER Cultural Anthropology Third Edition The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN Movement is Changing the What Is Anthropology? Face of Democracy THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN MARIANNE MAECKELBERGH Eriksen HOA3 00 pre 2 16/04/2013 16:04 A HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY Second Edition Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen Eriksen HOA3 00 pre 3 16/04/2013 16:04 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. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 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 Eriksen HOA3 00 pre 4 16/04/2013 16:04 Contents Series Preface vii Preface to the Second Edition viii Preface to the First Edition ix 1. Proto-Anthropology 1 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 20 Evolutionism and cultural history 21; Morgan 23; Marx 25; Bastian and the German tradition 27; Tylor and other Victorians 29; The Golden Bough and the Torres expedition 32; German diffusionism 35; The new sociology 38; Durkheim 39; Weber 41 3. Four Founding Fathers 46 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 68 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 96 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 120 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 Eriksen HOA3 00 pre 5 16/04/2013 16:04 vi A HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 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? 166 The end of modernism? 171; The postcolonial world 176; A new departure or a return to Boas? 179; Other positions 184 9. Global Networks 192 Towards an international anthropology? 194; Trends for the future 200; Biology and culture 203; Globalisation and the production of locality 211 Bibliography 221 Index 239 Eriksen HOA3 00 pre 6 16/04/2013 16:04 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 issues explored in small 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 a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.’ 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. Professor Vered Amit Dr Jon P. Mitchell vii Eriksen HOA3 00 pre 7 16/04/2013 16:04 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.