H I S T 0 R Y 0 F A I\ T H R 0 P 0 L 0 G Y • V 0 L U ~I E 2 FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED Essays on British Social Anthropology Edited by George W Stocking, Jc From reviews of volumes in the History of Anthropology series Volume I, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork "This first volume focuses on ethnographic fieldwork, a keystone of cultural anthro­ pology that is at once a unique means of collecting data (participant observation is often spoken of as an 'anthropological' method) and a crucial rite of passage that transforms novices into professionals .... The collection as a whole is of high qual­ ity, presenting valuable information and provocative analyses. For an anthropolo­ gist, the essays by historians offer fresh perspectives that differentiate this book from others on fieldwork."-American Scientist Volume 2, Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology "This volume is likely to prove indispensable to historians of anthropology in gen­ eral and of British anthropology in particular. A wide range of historical skills are on display, from traditional textual analysis to historical sociology of the most sophisticated sort, and the more or less thorough chronological coverage extends from the era of classical evolutionism virtually up to the present."-Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Volume 3, Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture ''. .. a timely publication in the History of Anthropology series ... makes an im­ portant contribution to our understanding of the central role museums played in the development of anthropology from 1850 to 1920. It is one of the earliest voices in the emerging debate about the present state of ethnographic museums and raises a number of important political and philosophical issues that must be addressed in considering the future directions of these institutions."-American Journal of Sociology Volume 4, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality "... tells of the brilliant American thinkers Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and how the latter two moved into the center stage of history as planners/thinkers for American society during and after WW IL Vignettes reveal Malinowski, John Layard, Abram Kardiner, Melville Herskovits, Gregory Bateson, and Jane Belo .... This book deserves a far wider audience than its obvious tar­ get .... It should be held in every community college and university library, in every town and city."-Choice The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53715 ISBN 0-299-09904-0 Functionalism Historicized HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY EDITOR George W. Stocking, Jr. Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago EDITORIAL BOARD Talal Asad Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Hull James Boon Department of Anthropology, Cornell University James Clifford Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz Donna Haraway Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz Curtis Hinsley Department of History, Colgate University Dell Hymes Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Henrika Kuklick Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania Bruce Trigger Department of Anthropology, McGill University Functionalism Historicizcd ESSAYS ON BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. HISTORY OF ANTHROPOWGY Volume 2 Inv. Nr.: Jlt?·· l"_,...__ ~4- L:andort:~~ THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 The University of Wisconsin Press, Ltd. 1 Gower Street London WClE 6HA, England Copyright © 1984 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under tide: Functionalism historicized. (History of anthropology; v.2) Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Functionalism (Social sciences)-History-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Ethnology-Great Britain-History­ Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Stocking, George W., 1928- . II. Series. GN363.F86 1984 306'.0941 84-40160 ISBN 0-299-09900-8 ISBN 0-299-09904-0 (paper) Contents FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED 3 THE FUNCTIONAL REDUCTION OF KINSHIP IN THE SOCIAL THOUGHT OF jOHN loCKE Thomas de Zengotita 10 ROBERTSON SMITH AND ]AMES FRAZER ON RELIGION: Two TRADITIONS" IN BRITISH SocIAL ANTHROPOLOGY Robert Alun Jones 31 TRIBAL EXEMPLARS: IMAGES OF POLITICAL AUTHORITY IN BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGY, 1885-1945 Henrika Kuklick 59 ENGLISHMEN, CELTS, AND IBERIANS: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM, 1892-1899 James Urry 83 DR. DURKHEIM AND MR. BROWN: COMPARATIVE SocIOLOGY AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1910 Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. 106 RADCLIFFE-BROWN AND BRITISH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY George W. Stocking, Jr. 131 FUNCTION, HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY: REFLECTIONS ON FIFTY YEARS IN THE BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGICAL TRADITION Hilda Kuper 192 vi CONTENTS MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES FROM PHILOLOGY To ANTHROPOLOGY IN Mm-NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY James Whitman 214 INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 231 INDEX 233 Functionalism Historicized FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED To what extent one may appropriately speak of differing "national traditions" in such a problematically "scientific" discipline as anthropology is a moot mat­ ter. Although the often-argued cultural variability of systems of belief and knowledge pulls in a quite opposite direction, the discipline's name bespeaks a unity of scientific discourse, and its historiographers characteristically write as if this were the case. But if the logic of logos discourages the addition of nationalizing adjectives, one suspects that the chapter headings and the in­ dex entries of works in German and in English on the history of anthropol­ ogy would suggest quite substantial differences in national perspective (cf. Muhlmann 1968; Harris 1968), and several symposia on "national traditions in anthropology" have indicated a considerable heterogeneity of historical development (Diamond, ed. 1980; Gerholm & Hannerz, eds. 1982). True, the editor of one of them spoke of a single "international anthropology" as a "diffused technic" now being exported "in various permutations and com­ binations" to academic centers all over the world (Diamond, ed. 1980:11); but if that comment perhaps suggests something about historically emergent rela­ tionships of knowledge and power, it does not do justice to the historical di­ versity of the discipline. Indeed, the unity of anthropology as a discipline is itself historically prob­ lematic. Our most widely held models of the structure of knowledge and the emergence of disciplines are those of a tree or a segmentary lineage: disci­ plines emerge by branching or fission. From this perspective, one might per­ haps think of anthropology not as one branch of the human sciences but as the end growth of the trunk itself. And indeed it may enrich our under­ standing to think of anthropology circa 1900 in such terms-as the residuary disciplinary legatee of an holistic approach to man, invoked in a discourse of the discarded. With the development of specialized disciplines devoted pri­ marily to the study of the various manifestations of "civilized" human nature -the psychology of rational consciousness, the economy of money, the so­ cial organization of European societies, the politics of the state, the history of written sources-anthropology was left to study analogous and often oppo­ sitionally conceived manifestations of human nature in the life of dark-skinned 3 4 FUNCTIONALISM HISTORICIZED "savages." Certainly, some practitioners thought of the discipline in terms that might be so construed-although in this context the unity of anthro­ pology could still be seen as historically contingent and likely to fragment (cf. Boas 1904). On the other hand, it may be that the model of discipline fission does not adequately represent the historical emergence of anthropology. Perhaps anthropology may better be thought of in terms of a model of fusion: the coming together of a number of historically and conceptually distinguishable modes of scientific and other scholarly inquiry-comparative anatomy, com­ parative psychology, comparative philology, archeology, folklore, among others -in relation to a specific subject matter, which historically has been for the most part that encompassed by the nineteenth-century image of the "dark­ skinned savage." If the history of this fusion is obscured by the umbrella-usage adopted around 1870 in the Anglo-American traditions, it was then still evi­ dent in the full titles of German anthropological societies, which were devoted to anthropologie, ethnologie, und urgeschichte, and in the still current usage of "anthropology" on the European continent to refer to the physical study of man. In France, where "ethnology" and "anthropology" have had quite dis­ tinct histories, the establishment of an inclusive national "anthropological" society is in fact an event of the last several years (Condominas et al., eds. 1979). Variable nationally, this fusion has been imperfect even in the Anglo­ American context, where the departmental cohabitation of social and bio­ logical anthropologists has often been tension-ridden, and in at least one in­ stance has ended in divorce-and where the formal national organizational unity of the discipline has recently become somewhat problematic, as some component