Bohannan P. Social Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart And

Bohannan P. Social Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart And

This Week’s Citation CiassIc®________CC/NUMBER 7 Bohannan P. Social anthropolog [ New York: Holt, Rinehart anc~’Winston,1963. 421 p. (Northwestern University, Evanston. ILl I This textbook of anthropology starts .with What with a lectureship at Oxford and 3 the social dimension and covers the cultural years in Africa, it was 10 years before I got dimension of societies, focusing primarily back to the US. For the first time, I was in a on family and kinship, government, and eco- context in which I had to see how it all hung nomics. [The Social Sciences Citation !ndexa together. The challenge was obvious. (SSCIa) indicates that this book has been During three years at Princeton, I wrote cited in over 110 publications since 1966.] out two lectures a week (before the days of the computer—or even the Xerox machine). Obviously I didn’t read them as I lectured, but my English habits said that one wrote p out one’s lectures to be used as a first draft. By the time I got to Northwestern Univer- sity and its Africa program, I had a wad of Paul Bohannan lecture materials. I had not set outto writea Office of the Dean textbook — I had set out to get my head Division of Social Sciences straight (which may be the best advice one and Communication could give anyone who sets out to write a University of Southern California textbook). But I needed a textbook. So for Los Angeles, CA 900894012 some three years, my students helped me get those lectures into readable shape. I never did a subsequent edition of this book. My excuse was—and is—that I was too busy January 14, 1986. with work I enjoyed to stop and make a ca- reer out of a textbook. Parts of the book are badly dated today. The material on color words came before Just before and just after World War II, I the ,major work on that topic and is simply got a thorough grounding in American1 an- wrong, the material on culture and personal- thropology2 from Emil Haury, Edward ity is old-fashioned, and the section called Spicer, and the rest of the department at “The Other Side of the Frontier” did not the University of Arizona. I knew what a cul- have the advantages of what we today know ture pattern is (an early anthropological about economic development. Other parts term for “model”). I knew the distribution of of it were never much good (especially chap- the digging stick in South America, and I ters 18 and 19, on religion, a topic that bores knew how far the lower left incisor of the fe- me). male chimpanzee rises above the gum. But parts of it I still stick by. The material Then, in 1947, I went to England for 3gradu- on kinship, family, household, divorce, con- ate work with4 E.E. Evans-Pritchard and tract, inequality, and institutions needs up- Meyer Fortes. British anthropology, in dating, but no great change, in my view. those days, was the finest in the world. The If I were to write a book of this sort today, British had discovered two important points: it would be about social process, not just (1) that French sociology spoke directly to about structure and culture as this book is. their endeavor and (2) that when a field The time dimension is, I am convinced, the worker learns a language, he must learn to anthropological frontier. I am only just be- speak it, not just to take some texts or to ginning to return to old ideas of culture 5pat- check an interpreter. tern. Process models are the next phase. 1. Hauy E W. Mogollon culture in the Foreszdale Valley. east-central Arizona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1985. 454 P. 2; Spinet E ft. The Yaquis: a cultural history. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980. 393 p. 3. Foetea M & Evans-Pritchard E E, eds. Africanpolitical systems. p London: Osford University Press for the International African Institute. 1948. 302 p. 4. Fortes M. The dynamics of clanship among the Tallensi: being the first part of an analysis of the social structure of the Trans-Volta tribe. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. 1945. 270 p. 5. Boh.anan P. Some models forplanning the future. J. Soc. Rio!. Struct. 7:37-59. 1984. 16 $&BS ©1986 by ISI® CURRENT CONTENTS®.

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