The Origins of Cultural Anthropology PDF

3 The Origins of Cultural 51 WHAT MAKES CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY POSSIBLE – AND NECESSARY Anthropology 55 ENCOUNTERING THE OTHER 59 RETHINKING SOCIETY: SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY SOCIAL THEORY 61 TOWARD AN...

3 The Origins of Cultural 51 WHAT MAKES CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY POSSIBLE – AND NECESSARY Anthropology 55 ENCOUNTERING THE OTHER 59 RETHINKING SOCIETY: SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY SOCIAL THEORY 61 TOWARD AN ETHNOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 62 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND THE FOUNDING OF MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY The Persian Empire under Darius encompassed a wide variety of different peoples 67 THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL and cultures, as did all ancient and modern empires. According to a story recounted CRISIS OF THE by the Greek historian Herodotus, Darius once summoned some Greek and some MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY AND Callatian (Indian) subjects to appear before him to explain their burial practices. BEYOND The Greeks said that they cremated their dead, whereas the Callatians reportedly 71 SUMMARY consumed theirs. Darius asked the Greeks if they would ever eat their dead, which mortified the Greeks. He then asked the Callatians if they would ever burn their dead, at which suggestion they “uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing.” Herodotus concluded from this and similar experiences: if anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably, after careful consideration of their relative merits, choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things.... One can see by this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it “king of all.” (Herodotus 1972: 219–20)  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 51 No doubt Herodotus was not the first person to notice that humans differ in their beliefs, their values, and even their bodies over space and time. However remote and “backward” they may seem, no society in the history of the human race has probably been so isolated that they did not have neighbors who varied from them in language, religion, and other customs. Even so, as abundantly obvious as human diversity is, and as attentive to such details as Herodotus was, neither he nor most societies went a step further to organize a systematic study, a science, of human diversity. Herodotus came very close, and his insights seem convincing to this day, but no such thing as anthropology was created in his day or for many days afterward. Finally, in passing, Herodotus was wrong about one thing: given a choice between one’s own customs and some other society’s, usually there is no “careful consideration of their relative merits.” If you were given the choice between burying and eating your dead, would it really require – or even allow – weighing the two options? Rather, our customs are often so deeply ingrained in us that the preference is automatic and strong – like “second nature.” WHAT MAKES CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY POSSIBLE – AND NECESSARY Strangely, or not so strangely, humans have only recently thought to do such a thing as cultural anthropology: for most of human history (and most human societies today), there has never been anything even remotely like cultural anthropology. This is not to say, as mentioned above, that humans were never before aware of behavioral differences between themselves and other groups, nor that they never pondered these differences. However, mere awareness of the otherness – of what we sometimes call the “Other” (remembering that each of us is the other to everyone else) – is not cultural anthropology, and throughout history most societies have not proceeded from acknowledgment of other humans to a science of human otherness. Let us begin, then, with two statements that are true and important: anthro- pology is a very new science, and anthropology is a very unlikely science. The first of these claims is easy enough to understand and defend. Until about a hundred and fifty years ago (and maybe considerably less), there was nothing like cultural anthropology, or any other kind of anthropology, in the pantheon of human sciences. Some social and natural sciences, from history and philosophy to mathematics and physics, are ancient. Anthropology is easily the last of the major social sciences to emerge, and what we recognize as modern cultural anthropology assumed its form only about a century ago. Why was this discipline so late to appear on the horizon of human inquiry? The answer relies on the second statement: something about anthropology must be very unlikely. That is, anthropology is an unlikely thing to do, an unlikely way to think. Philosophy is fairly unlikely, yet recognizable philosophy was being done over two thousand years ago as a result of certain people making certain kinds of observations and asking certain kinds of questions. By looking around at the 52 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES various cities and states and their political forms, something like political science was fairly obvious. By looking around at the events occurring before and during one’s lifetime, something like history was fairly obvious. By looking at the sky and the stars, something like astronomy was fairly obvious. By looking at objects in motion, something like physics was fairly obvious. But by looking at other human societies, something like anthropology was apparently not fairly obvious. Why is this? Why did observation of human diversity not lead to a science of human diversity? The best way to think about this is to consider not the observations themselves but the responses to the observations. Human diversity has always been an acknowledged fact, but what humans do with – or about – that fact is another matter entirely. Clearly, anthropology is not the default response. Rather, the default or first response seems to be some combination of: indifference toward the Other fear and hostility toward the Other judgment and condemnation of the Other desire and/or effort to eradicate the Other, either through conquest or “conversion” rejection of the Other as less than one’s own kind – and sometimes less than completely human. These attitudes are immanent in most of the surviving records we have from past societies, ancient and not so ancient. Other societies were typically regarded as “savages,” “barbarians,” “infidels,” “primitives,” “uncivilized,” “evil,” and so on. To be different was to be bad, to be wrong. This is distinctly not a perspective from which cultural anthropology will grow. As with Herodotus, there were some near-misses in the ancient world. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes observed the difference and the relativity of religion across cultures: Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with gray eyes and red hair.... If oxen or lions had hands which enabled them to draw and paint pictures as men do, they would portray their gods as having bodies like their own; horses would portray them as horses, and oxen as oxen. (quoted in Wheelwright 1966: 33) Ultimately, the ancient Greeks never developed an anthropological science, rather seeing people unlike themselves as “barbarian” and “uncivilized.” This situation is much more common than one might think. In the contemporaneous Torah/Old Testament, non-Jews were idolaters, sinners, and evil-doers; no serious possibility of acceptability without believing in the “right” god and practicing the “right” culture was entertained. Medieval Christianity and Islam, as well as most other religious and cultural traditions, did no better. In fact, there are probably two recurring obstacles to the very possibility of something like cultural anthropology:  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 53 Absolute certainty in the truth and goodness of one’s own culture (ethno- centrism). Lack of information about other societies, or poor or patently false information about them. Certainty in one’s own truth and goodness, a kind of “one-possibility thinking,” is characteristic of most societies, traditional or modern. Cultural certainty is a barrier to relativism and thus to cultural anthropology, since only one kind of thought is permitted or at least valued highly; all others are by definition false or unacceptable. Why then would you want to know more about those barbarians, those infidels, those blasphemers? Lack of information or possession of poor information poses its own challenge. If you do not know much about another society and culture, it will be difficult to say anything meaningful and useful about it. The first thing you will naturally try to do is to assimilate the Other into your own schemes of understanding. This led to some amusing if not depressing results. For example, even the most hard-headed medieval Europeans could not ignore the fact of anomalous archaeological features in their own territories. Saxo Grammaticus, writing in the twelfth century about the enormous stone edifices of Denmark, opined that “the country of Denmark was once cultivated and worked by giants.... Should any man question that this is accomplished by superhuman force, let him look up at the tops of certain moun- tains and say, if he knows how, what man hath carried such immense boulders up to their crests” (quoted in Slotkin 1965: 6). Even into the sixteenth century men Slotkin, J.S., ed. 1965. of good conscience still struggled with the signs of otherness in their midst; of Readings in Early Anthropology. London: the Paleolithic and Neolithic artifacts scattered around Europe, Ulisse Aldrovandi Methuen & Co. said that “they were natural accretions developed by geological processes,” Conrad Gesner “that they were thunderbolts. Stone projectiles were usually called ‘elf arrows’ or ‘thunderbolts’ by laymen” (quoted in Slotkin 1965: 44). In yet other cases, unexplainable but obviously non-Christian phenomena were either ignored or dismissed as demonic. Much more recently, the devoutly Muslim Taliban destroyed enormous Buddhist statues rather than allow those idols to corrupt Afghanistan. Now, attribution of stoneworks and artifacts to giants and elves might launch a science of giants and elves, but it is not likely to launch a science of human diversity. In fact, it cannot do so, since no connection is drawn between those objects and humans; rather, such opinions led observers away from humanity and from a science like cultural anthropology. Humans do what we do; giants and elves – non-humans – do those odd and remarkable things. And if that is not bad enough, the reports of “monstrous races” that persisted from ancient times right up to the late Middle Ages in Europe were the tombstones of a stillborn anthropology. 54 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES BOX 3.1 THE “MONSTROUS RACES” OF THE PRE-MODERN WORLD From the Greeks through the Romans to the medieval Europeans, travelers and scholars spoke and wrote about various pseudo-human if not non-human races such as: PLATE 3.1 A Blemmyae, one of the “monstrous races” of ancient and medieval literature Amazons, warlike women who amputate their right breast so as to better draw a bow Amyctyrae, beings with such large lower lips that they can use them for umbrellas Androgini, who have the sex organs of both men and women Antipodes, beings who walk upside-down Astomi, people who have no mouths and are covered with fur. They survive by smelling food. Blemmyae, creatures who have no heads but have faces in their chests Bragmanni, who stand all day in fire staring at the sun Cyclopes, beings with one large eye Cynocephali, people with dog-heads Panotii, beings with ears that dangle down to their feet Sciopods, people with a single huge leg and foot, who lie on their backs and shade themselves with their foot And the usual panoply of pygmies, giants, hairy men and women, and cannibals. More amazing still, writers described them as if they were real, as if the reporters had seen them for themselves, even producing maps illustrating where each monstrous race dwelt – Astomi in east India, Blemmyae in Libya, Bragmanni in India, Cyclopes in Sicily and India, and so on. A full accounting would show that these races tended to inhabit the East (India), the North (the Baltic and Arctic regions), and the South (Africa) – everywhere that was remote and exotic to Europeans except the West, where no people lived since the world was believed to end there (see e.g. Friedman 2000).  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 55 ENCOUNTERING THE OTHER As colorful as these descriptions are, it must be apparent that such a state of knowledge is not conducive to a serious discipline like cultural anthropology. First, if these beings are as weird and unpleasant as they sound, no one is going to be inclined to study them. Second, if they are not human at all, there is little light they could shed on humanity. Third and most dramatically, fear and revulsion will tend to keep people far away from them. At some point this all had to change if anthropology was ever to emerge. So the question for us is, what is it that makes a science like anthropology possible? And more than just possible but necessary? What kind of society can, and must, enter upon a line of inquiry that will end with the birth of anthropology – and not specifically the science of anthropology so much as the anthropological perspective described previously? Obviously, it will be a society that has lost or at least shaken its own cultural certainty as well as one that has accumulated a body of accurate and useful information about the Other. This will inevitably depend on and follow from a new and sustained kind of encounter with the Other. That is, someone does not say, “Let’s invent anthropology” and then start to seek out different forms of humans. Instead, one first bumps against different forms of humans and then, gradually and grudgingly, comes to a point where one is doing anthropology. The time and place where these conditions began to coalesce was Europe circa 1500. Around then and around there, a series of discrete yet interrelated develop- ments began to force not just an awareness but a curiosity, even an appreciation, of otherness on observers. Among these new experiences were the following. The “voyages of discovery” and the rise of colonization The most familiar and prominent new factor in late medieval Europe was the “discovery” of new lands and new peoples in places where lands and people were not known or even imagined. Europeans had long known of other societies – Muslim, African, Asian – but the encounter with Native Americans and the vastly greater number of African, Asian, and eventually Australian peoples met by European travelers opened their eyes to a diversity that was previously undreamed of. Yet, as exciting (and profitable) as all this discovery was, it presented a psychological and cultural challenge. Who were these people? How did they get all the way out there? In fact, were they people at all? As incomprehensible as that question sounds to us, to early explorers it made sense and even forced itself on them. For the Christian Bible did not mention these natives. Were they descendants of Adam and Eve, like the Western Christians and supposedly all humans? If so, why did they look and act so differently? But if they were not descendants of Adam and Eve, then what were they? Animals? Degraded humans? Creations of Satan? Or, just as bad, creations of some other god? The question of the humanity of the “Indians” was quite a serious one. Within decades of Columbus’ arrival in America, there was a significant debate within the 56 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES Catholic Church as to the identity of the natives. Were they human or not? What this meant was, did they have souls or not? The “conservative” position was that they did not have souls and therefore were not human; if this were the case, then they could be classified and treated as animals (also believed to have no souls) – chased off, carried away, enslaved, or killed as suited the conquerors. The “liberal” position, championed by Bartolome de las Casas, was that they did have souls and therefore were human. If this were the case, then they deserved “humane” and “Christian” treatment – they could not be killed or enslaved wantonly. But neither could they be left alone; their human souls required “saving,” and they deserved and needed the benefits of the “true” culture and the “true” religion. The Church finally decided in 1537 that the Indians were humans and ordered that they be dealt with in a humane way, but this did not stop the ravages and abuses to which they were See Chapter 12 and beyond subjected by administrators, missionaries, soldiers, traders, and settlers. The exploration of the late 1400s and early 1500s, which continued into the late 1800s, brought new otherness to the attention of Europeans who were well satisfied with the truth and goodness of their own society. This was the kind of otherness that is “out there,” far away and intellectually manageable, but still an ideological and religious problem. The sheer volume of it – hundreds and hundreds of new societies with their own languages, religions, and complete cultures – was daunting but thought-provoking. Encounters with other Eurasian civilizations “Primitive” societies were a problem of sorts but the kind of problem that visitors could ignore or excuse most of the time. Other “advanced” societies were a bigger problem. Since at least the 1300s, European adventurers had been traveling to and bringing back reports from distant civilizations like China, the Islamic world, and India. Marco Polo is a well-known example, whose descriptions of splendor in China were at first taken as fiction. Even earlier, the Crusades (in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) had gotten Europeans far from home and into exotic new places where they saw the wonders of Constantinople, Syria, and Mesopotamia. They could not help but notice that these societies were not only different but in some inescapable ways superior to their own. The Eastern civilizations were often more urban, more literate, richer, more “cultured,” and more powerful than anything in Europe. This should not be: Europe supposedly had the “true” religion and culture. The foreigners were idolaters, infidels, devil-worshippers. Yet they had things that Europeans valued and desired and would acquire and utilize – not the least of which were block printing and gunpowder. So, the experience of these travels and conflicts showed not only that other civilizations existed and were different but that they were “better” in some ways. Otherness could not be laughed away as inferiority; there were things the Other did better and things the newcomers needed to learn from them.  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 57 The “Renaissance” The so-called Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries refers to a “rebirth.” What was coming “back to life,” and what had been dead or moribund for centuries in Europe was city life, literacy, long-distance trade, and the widespread exchange of ideas that marks the modern world and marked the ancient world. After the fall of Rome, cities had dwindled and disappeared, literacy had retreated to the monasteries (or at least books had – often monks could not read them but copied them by rote), and a subsistence level of agriculture tying serfs to the land and to the lords who owned the land ossified culture and stultified diversity. What little art and literature existed was made for and about the dominant class, culture, and religion. The Renaissance was thus a rebirth of a specific cultural model and progenitor, namely ancient Greece and Rome. Europe had always maintained a vague dream of Rome but knew little about it. Ancient texts had long been lost, and the ability to read what remained suffered as well. Meanwhile, the Islamic world had preserved the works of Plato and Aristotle and others, studied them, advanced them, and incorporated them into their civilization. With the Crusades and the subsequent (ambivalent) trade relations with Islam, Europe rediscovered its ancient texts and began to familiarize itself with its own ancestry. Of course, the assumption had always been that, while the Greeks and Romans could not possibly be Christians, they were in some way “pre-Christians” or “proto-Christians.” Medieval Europeans knew that Plato talked about an ideal world of perfect forms, which sounded a lot like heaven to them. They simply presumed that the ancients were a lot like them. However, the reality was considerably different – and considerably more disturbing. Greeks and Romans had their own very distinct, and very non-Christian, religions. They had their own political systems, kinship systems, economies, and so on. Reading ancient texts was not like reading texts from one’s own time; the ancients lived in a very different mental and cultural world. Many of the ideas and styles were very appealing, but they were most definitely foreign and other. But this meant that Europe’s own ancestors, their own forebears, exhibited otherness. It was one thing to face the Other across the ocean; Europeans could disregard or belittle that difference. It was worse to face the Other in a rival civilization; they could not be ignored, but they could be resisted. But it was deeply troubling to face the Other in one’s own ancestry, in one’s own family tree. Early modern Europeans found that their own ancestors were Other to them. The “Protestant Reformation” Since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of Rome and then of post-Roman Europe, there had been only one official truth about religion, which was the Roman Catholic truth. All other opinions about religion were “heresy,” from the Greek word hairesis meaning “to choose.” One did not choose one’s own views and truths but received them from authority. Of course, there had always been 58 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES disagreements about those truths, but those disagreements were always settled by and in favor of authority. So, reform had been repeatedly attempted and thwarted over the centuries, but Martin Luther’s movement escaped that fate. It caught on, much to the consternation of the authorities. Luther claimed (often in the most shocking language) that the Church was wrong about many of its beliefs and was actually anti-Christian. He called the Pope and all Catholics blasphemers and atheists, and he said he could prove it: just go back to the “source,” to the Bible itself. To assist, he produced a German translation of the Bible. The Protestant Reformation introduced a schism into Christian Europe that would not go away, no matter how hard anyone tried. And they tried hard. Religious wars tore apart Europe for years, until a peace was declared, allowing the two “religions” to co-exist. Note that the peace did not allow all religions to exist, only Catholicism and Lutheranism. Other “protestant” sects such as Unitarians, Shakers, Quakers, Anabaptists, as well as non-Christian religions like Judaism, were still out of bounds. But two religions are much more than twice as many as one: one is monopoly, two (or more) is diversity. When the compromise broke down, resulting in the Thirty Years War (1618–48) and millions of deaths, a new peace recognized three religions – Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. Europe was never again to be a homogeneous, one-possibility place. Religious diversity was here to stay, despite everyone’s best efforts. No one had wanted multiple religions; the Catholic Church wanted just one (Catholicism) while Luther wanted just one (Lutheranism). Instead, what they got was not two, not three, but hundreds and hundreds. Westerners were now, and would forever be, the Other to each other. The scientific revolution The so-called scientific revolution drew its inspiration from many of the same sources as the above and had many of the same consequences. Like Luther, people were taking it upon themselves to “go to the source” and verify the claims and beliefs of the time. In this case, the source is the natural world. Science did not say then, and does not say now, that all authorities are wrong. It merely says (1) that you must cross-examine authority or tradition, that you cannot accept a position simply because it comes from an authority or tradition (in other words, you must be skeptical, no matter what the source of the claim); and (2) that you must base your conclusions on careful and sustained observations of external reality. This can mean experimentation, or it can mean merely the collection of empirical data from the natural world. While the intent was not and is not to challenge and defeat all received opinion and tradition, the consequence was and is to stop taking mere authority as an authority. They have been wrong before, and they could be wrong again. The ultimate authority is one’s own experience and observation: if traditions or rulers say one thing but experience suggests another, then a person should trust experience. So, if tradition says there are dog-headed people out there but observation reveals none, we should conclude that there are not dog-headed people out there.  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 59 RETHINKING SOCIETY: SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SOCIAL THEORY By the middle and end of the seventeenth century, European scholarship and society were in ferment. The old certainty, while not vanquished, had been shaken and cracked. It was no longer possible to delude themselves that theirs was the only society in the world nor even the best society in the world. It was perfectly obvious that their own society was full of problems – crime, vice, inequality, injustice, hunger, poverty, war, and other socially undesirable circumstances. Criticizing one’s own society became an increasingly common thing to do, although often in indirect and fictional ways, like Thomas More’s Utopia or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. One necessary prerequisite of any social criticism, let alone any social change, is an alternative. If not this, then what? Is it possible for society to be better? Is it even possible for society to be different? And where would a model for another possibility come from? A model appeared at that moment: all those “primitive societies” that had just been “discovered.” Actually, two views or models of the primitives eventually emerged based on the same experiences – the “brutish savage” and the “n noble savage.” Noble savage The former model is represented by the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The notion, often associated with Rousseau, that A pivotal moment in European history arrived when one of those “Protestant” sects, non-Western or “primitive” the Puritans, staged a revolt against King Charles I that led to his execution (1649). people are actually happier No contemporary European society had ever attempted such a radical social and more virtuous than experiment, and many thought it could not succeed, including Hobbes, who argued Westerners. Based on the for the need for a strong central government like the old monarchy. To prove his idea that humans are free point, he employed primitive societies as his example of a world without govern- and equal in “a state of nature” but that social ment. In his famous Leviathan (1651) he characterized primitives as living “in a state institutions deprive them of nature” without society or government, which might sound like a good thing: of that freedom and everyone was equal, but they were also solitary. Humans did not interact with other equality. humans, not peacefully at any rate. Because all were equal, and totally independent from each other, competition and conflict naturally followed. Hobbes never set foot in a “primitive society,” and his judgments of them are at best based on second-hand accounts if not pure fantasy. His opinion was clearly negative: probably the most quoted phrase in his entire work describes the quality of primitive life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Whether it is true or false (and it is mostly false), it is important for taking non-Western societies seriously. Hobbes had established that those remote and exotic societies are not irrelevant, not mere objects of curiosity and derision, but important windows on to the human condition – perhaps into the past of our own condition. This was not anthropology just yet, but it was a real (if troubled) step in that direction. The “noble savage” model is most closely associated with Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract (1762). In certain ways, he compared “savages” favorably to his own countrymen and institutions, finding in them the very archetype of free and natural humanity. He too saw them as living in a “state of nature,” independent and equal, enjoying “the peacefulness of their passions, and their ignorance of vice.” He contrasted their “natural existence,” distinguished by instinct, 60 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES amorality, appetite, natural liberty, and individual strength, to his own “civil society,” with its formal justice, morality, reason, civil liberty, and public will. Of course, Rousseau’s image of primitive society is as simplistic and stereotyped as Hobbes’; there is no such thing as “natural man,” since all humans are cultured and none live in a state of raw nature, and there is no such thing as “savage society” but a rather a staggering variety of traditional cultures – from the happy to the miserable, from the peaceful to the warlike. In addition, he was by no means recom- mending a return to the primitive state but merely pointing out the two possible states of humanity and the costs of evolving from one to the other. BOX 3.2 BRUTISH SAVAGE VERSUS NOBLE SAVAGE In Leviathan Hobbes wrote: From this equality of ability arises equality of hope of attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two people desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and... endeavor to destroy or subdue one another. Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is for every man, against every man. In such a condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no cultivating of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the comfortable buildings; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no literature; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In The Social Contract Rousseau wrote: Although, in this state [civil society], he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man. Rousseau was clearly not doing anthropology – we would never call our subjects “stupid and unimaginative” – but his perspective was different from anything we have seen before. Rousseau and Hobbes and others like them took the Other seriously, declaring them a worthy – even a necessary – subject of study and discussion. And Rousseau’s view, while not much more realistic than Hobbes’, was definitely more positive: not only were there things to learn about distant societies, there were  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 61 actually things to learn from them. Contemporary Westerners could admire them and wish that Western culture was, in some ways, more like them. TOWARD AN ETHNOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Approaching the nineteenth century, we do not find anything yet that is quite recognizable as modern anthropology. We do, however, begin to see the foundations on which such a science will grow. First, the cultural certainty of Europe has been challenged, though not destroyed. In fact, the nineteenth century was a particularly ethnocentric period, partly a cause and partly an effect of the new phase of industrial colonialism and the relations between (white) Europe and the (non-white) colonies. See Chapters 12 and 13 But even that was a mixed blessing for what would become anthropology, since this prolonged contact between the two worlds provided the second ground for the new science – more and higher quality observational information about non-European societies. It is no coincidence that a discipline like anthropology – or “ethnology,” the study of culture or ways of life – would develop at this moment, in relation to colonial administration, which provided the access to other societies and the practical utility of knowledge about them. Out of the wealth of new information came a desire if not the need to classify it and arrange it in some sensible order, and thus to “explain” it. Writing years later, Evans-Pritchard defined ethnology as the project “to classify peoples on the basis of their social and cultural characteristics and then to explain their distribution at the present time, or in past times, by the movement and mixture of peoples and the diffusion of cultures” (1951: 4). The questions asked by early ethnologists, then, were largely historical and geographical: how are cultures related to each other (and to Western culture), where did these relations come from, and what was the ultimate source from which they all flowed? In other words, how did Culture as a whole or particular cultures or specific institutions and practices within cultures originate, and how did those things change over time into their various manifestations, including the “modern” Western one? Two similar but different answers emerged. One was diffusionism, the idea that Diffusionism Culture (with a capital “C”) had originated once or at most a few times and then The early ethnological or anthropological position spread from that center or those centers of origin outward to other locations on the or theory that Culture, or globe. This approach was expressed in the German Kulturkreis (“culture circle”) specific cultural practices, school of thought that envisioned culture as one or more circles emanating out from objects, or institutions had their center(s) like ripples on a pond. The greater the proximity between societies appeared once or at most a in space, the greater the similarity in culture. The center was identified sometimes few times and spread out as Egypt, sometimes elsewhere, but the idea of following the ripples “backward” from their original center. in space suggested the possibility of following them backward in time as well – back to the first culture. The other approach, especially after the mid-nineteenth century, was evolutionism. In this view, the observed cultures descended from one or more 62 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES “ancestral” cultures, passing through various stages or phases of cultural development along the way. Whether there was a single (unilinear) series of cultures or several independent (multilinear) series was an open question. Either way, cultures had a “history” which could and should be reconstructed. The goal was to arrive at a set of cultural types or stages that would describe the actual process by which cultures evolved from one state to another – something like a timeline with different cultural types attached to certain moments in time. However, how would nineteenth-century ethnologists go about this research? It was impossible to board a time machine and return to selected moments to observe the culture. All that was available was the present. Fortunately for cultural researchers, they thought they saw all around themselves “survivals,” traces, virtual living fossils of those earlier days still in existence – “primitive societies.” Since they could not study time, they could study space and project it onto time, that is, convert geography into chronology. By taking the various primitive peoples of the world today as representatives, if not actual frozen specimens, of days gone by, they could rebuild the history of culture. Different ethnologists arrived at different solutions to the problem at hand, but all of the solutions shared certain features. For one, they arranged the observable societies “in order” of evolutionary progress. The “simplest” or “most primitive” naturally filled the “lower” and earlier spots; Australian Aboriginals were a common Durkheim, Emile. 1965 candidate for that honor, as Emile Durkheim concluded in The Elementary Forms. The Elementary of the Religious Life (1915). What, he asked, was the first kind of religion, or what is Forms of the Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. the most minimal, elementary form? It is the Aboriginals, who have totems and rituals but no gods or institutionalized practices and offices like modern European/Christian ones. Ethnologists would disagree on the precise order of stages and the precise choice of representative for each stage, but the general idea was fairly standard. Morgan, Lewis Henry. Thus, Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) distilled the stages of cultural evolution down 1877. Ancient Society, or to three – savagery, barbarism (each subdivided into lower, middle, and upper), Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from and civilization – characterized by certain diagnostic cultural features (e.g., bow and Savagery, through arrow, farming, writing). “Progress” was based on technological achievement (the Barbarism to Civilization. threshold from savagery to barbarism was the invention of pottery, for instance), New York: Henry Holt and Company. a standard which was important to Westerners and in which Westerners excelled. And of course, “civilization” was his own society – nineteenth-century Euro- American culture. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND THE FOUNDING OF MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY There are a number of objections to the ethnological, diffusion/evolution approach to culture. That it is ethnocentric is one: observers took themselves as the “end” or “goal” of culture, and compared all other cultures to themselves. The more unlike “us” they were, the further down the scale they went. That it is not particularly useful is another: even if the evolutionary order is correct, why do cultures evolve, and why  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 63 did those surviving fossil cultures not evolve? Both of those objections troubled subsequent scholars, but another objection that bothered them as much or more was that it is so speculative: theorists did not know anything concrete about the past of those societies (or, at the time, even much about the current cultures of those societies), so they were merely speculating or worse. Other later critics would complain that, more than guessing, (white European) ethnologists/anthropologists were using (non-white non-European) natives as objects for their own selfish ends. There is some merit to that complaint. But for now, the point is that by the turn of the twentieth century, a few observers were despairing of the ethnological/historical approach. Two men in particular would turn from it vehemently and put their stamps on the new science of cultural anthropology. They are Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski. Boas (1858–1942) is widely regarded as the father of modern cultural anthro- pology. Trained originally in Germany in the late 1800s as a physicist and geographer, he brought a keen observer’s eye and a strict scientist’s method to the new science he shaped. In the 1880s he came to the Arctic coast of North America to study the color of sea water. While working there, he inevitably became acquainted with the local Inuit (Eskimo) people; soon, he realized that they were even more inter- esting than sea water, and not at all “primitive.” He soon turned his back on the nineteenth-century “comparative” model as inaccurate and ethnocentric; as a scientist, he knew that to judge or evaluate your subject is to not observe or understand it adequately. By this decision, he essentially invented cultural relativism. PLATE 3.2 Franz Boas, one of the founders of modern anthropology, posing for a museum exhibit around 1895 64 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES One of Boas’ first and most important statements about what would become anthropology was his 1896 paper “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,” first published in the journal Science. In this classic essay, still read in anthropology, he proposed that there are no “higher” or “lower” cultures and that all such judgments are merely relative to one’s own standards of culture. Thus, any “ranking” of cultures is suspect from the outset and probably says more about the student than about the cultures studied. He went on to state that the similarities or differences between cultures are not as significant as diffusionists and evolutionists think because widely separated cultures can arrive at similar adaptations due to environmental factors. Rather than ordering cultures on the basis of supposed progress or similarity, he recommended actually observing each single culture in maximal detail and each single part of a culture within the context of the whole. Thus, he gave voice to holism. He emphasized that the goal of this science should not be the construction of elaborate and speculative cultural histories but rather the careful and accurate description of individual cultures through intense and objective observation. This observation would require personal, close-up experience with the culture for prolonged periods of time. When he settled into his academic position in America, he became the teacher and mentor of the first generation of American anthropologists. Thus, he essentially invented American anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) did his work slightly later than Boas but has probably had an equally profound influence on the discipline, if only because Boas was so resistant to the idea of making any theories of culture. Boas in particular insisted that the data required to make good theories were still lacking, so any proposed theory would be premature. It would be better to collect data now – do the “science” now – and make theories later. But of course a science, even in its infancy, cannot proceed without theory. Theory helps to identify the question, suggest the method, and organize the evidence. Accordingly, Malinowski proposed one that would become extremely influential in the first half of the twentieth century. Malinowski got his start in anthropology by accident, as did Boas. Originally trained in math and physics in Poland, he turned to the science of humanity after reading James George Frazer’s ethnological classic The Golden Bough in 1910. The Golden Bough has affected many readers since it appeared in 1890 and is perhaps the “gold standard” of the nineteenth-century comparative project. Frazer took examples of myth and religion from all around the world and juxtaposed them in a fascinating but decontextualized way; on any one page, he could alternate from Mexico to Madagascar to India to Greece and back again. However, the cultural setting or context of each of these references was not and could never be developed by this procedure and in the space allotted to it. Malinowski’s exposure to the comparative and evolutionary method came at a time when a few scholars had begun to call for more in-depth knowledge and description of particular societies. Boas had helped inspire this approach, and by the turn of the century expeditions were setting out intentionally to collect cultural data – a team from Cambridge to the Torres Straits in 1898 to 1899, another to India in 1901 to 1902, still another to Melanesia in 1907 to 1908. The future  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 65 anthropological star, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, made such a trip to the Andaman Islands in 1906 to 1908. However, most of these visits were extremely short (often only a few days), were conducted by people who were not specially trained in anthropological field methods (since such methods did not really exist yet), and necessarily involved working through interpreters and acculturated local people. However, by this time some scholars like W. H. R. Rivers were beginning to recognize the need for and to call for more “intensive” research, which he defined as research: in which the worker lives for a year or more among a community of perhaps four or five hundred people and studies every detail of their life and culture; in which he comes to know every member of the community personally; in which he is not content with generalized information, but studies every feature of life and custom in concrete detail and by means of the vernacular language. It is only by such work that one can realize the immense extent of the knowledge which is now awaiting the inquirer, even in places where the culture has already Kuper, Adam. 1983. suffered much change. It is only by such work that it is possible to discover the Anthropology and Anthropologists: The incomplete and even misleading character of much of the vast mass of survey Modern British School, work which forms the existing material of anthropology. revised edn. London and (quoted in Kuper 1983: 7) New York: Routledge. Malinowski was one of the main figures to accept the challenge thrown down by the likes of Boas and Rivers. Malinowski started his fieldwork career at age 30 with six months in New Guinea. He returned to the Trobriand Islands for two more years of work in 1915 to 1916 and 1917 to 1918. In so doing, he helped establish the modern fieldwork methods of cultural anthropology. Malinowski determined that there were three general types of cultural data, each requiring its own collection technique. The first was the description and analysis of institutions, which were to be studied by thorough documentation of concrete evidence. More precisely, this meant the creation of charts of activities and customs associated with a particular institution, based on accounts given by the natives as well as on observations by the investigator. This method would yield a literal visible representation of the “mental chart” that members of the society possess. The second type of data, constituting another dimension of cultural reality, was the minutiae of everyday life, which filled out and deepened (if complicated) the analysis of general institutions. As he noted, the emphasis on rules and structures and institutions left an impression of more precision and consistency than is actually seen in real life. So, abstract or generalized presentations of social structures had to be complemented with particular and personal instantiations or uses of those rules and structures in the details of everyday life, anticipating the distinction between “structure” and “action” that anthropologists like Raymond Firth would elaborate. The third type of data included cultural content like narratives, utterances, folklore, and other conventional Malinowski, Bronislaw. sayings and activities. The immediate result of his methods was his epic ethnography 1984. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Long Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), in which he modeled what a sensitive and Grove, IL: Waveland informed fieldworker could do with the data he collected. Press, Inc. 66 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES The other profound influence of Malinowski on the fledgling field of anthro- pology was his theoretical approach, which was significantly connected to his Cultural evolutionism method. Like Boas, he rejected cultural evolutionism and speculative historical The early ethnological or reconstructions. As he wrote: “I still believe in evolution, I am still interested in anthropological position or origins, in the process of development, only I see more and more clearly that answers theory that Culture started at some moment in the past to any evolutionary questions must lead directly to the empirical study of the facts and evolved from its and institutions, the past development of which we wish to reconstruct” (quoted in “primitive” beginnings Kuper 1983: 9). Thus, anthropologists should study the present with all possible through a series of stages to attention and clarity before they indulge in speculations about the past. What a achieve its “higher” or more fieldworker sees today is institutions, the individuals acting within them, and modern form. standard “narratives” or “scripts” which those individuals produce and reproduce in the process. These investigators can hunt for – and perhaps only for – the function of institutions and practices today, in the present. Hence, he recommended an approach known as functionalism. Rather than pursue its history (a potentially vain pursuit), the anthropologist can observe its function here and now. What is the function, for example, of marriage, or political systems, or religion? For Malinowski, the essence of function was to be found in the needs of the individuals who comprise a society. Society, he asserted, is ultimately a collection of individual human beings. So, culture “functions” according to the needs and nature of those individuals, who have two kinds of needs – physical and psychological. Each item of culture, or culture as a whole, must serve to fill one or more of these needs. It is the job of the ethnographer to determine what needs it fills and how. Functionalism became a reigning idea during the early twentieth century and not only in anthropology (Durkheim had already elaborated it in sociology). However, others began to turn the idea in new directions, if not turn against it altogether. Radcliffe-Brown argued that culture does in fact function, but not in the way that Malinowski imagined. Radcliffe-Brown maintained, rather, that individuals are relatively trivial; what is important – and enduring – is society itself, the com- munity, the social whole. In opposition to Malinowski’s functionalism, he advocated a “social” or “structural” functionalism, the social function of institutions defined by him as “the contribution that they make to the formation and maintenance of a social order” (Radcliffe-Brown 1965: 154). Radcliffe-Brown’s focus on institutions versus individuals and on order versus action was hugely influential on the British tradition of social anthropology, which came to emphasize law, kinship systems, and so on. Social order or social structure was not a mere idea, an abstraction in the mind of the anthropologist, in this view, but a real and concrete thing. He went so far as to assert that society can be studied, but culture cannot: You cannot have a science of culture. You can study culture only as a characteristic of a social system.... If you study culture, you are always studying the acts of behavior of a specific set of persons who are linked together in a social structure. (quoted in Kuper 1983: 55)  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 67 THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CRISIS OF THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND Just as approaching maturity often entails a life crisis and a rebellion against tradition in individuals, so cultural anthropology suffered a disciplinary crisis and rebellion in the mid-twentieth century that was perhaps a sign of maturation and a break- through to a deeper level of understanding – and self-understanding. The sources of this crisis and the call to “rethink” or “reinvent” anthropology probably included the aging and passing of the founding generation, as happens in all disciplines. However, even more important was the change in the subjects of cultural anthro- pology themselves, the “primitive peoples” and small traditional societies, which forced a change in the science that purported to study them. Not the least of these changes was the rush of independence movements that ended the centuries-old European project of colonialism and empire. Finally, perhaps a critical point had been See Chapter 13 reached which compelled anthropology to look at itself in new and sometimes uncomfortable ways – not only at what it was doing but even at the very tools and concepts it was using to do it. One of the first and most important moves in this “new anthropology” was the announcement by Edmund Leach that societies are not always as discrete Leach, Edmund R. 1954. and traditional as we think they are. In his seminal Political Systems of Highland Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston: Burma (1954) he described a situation in which societies overlapped each other Beacon Press. without clear and permanent boundaries and in which the very politics and culture of the multicultural system fluctuated over time. Given the realities of highland Burmese social relations, he concluded that “ordinary ethnographic conventions... are hopelessly inappropriate” (281). In fact, he went so far as to argue that the entire notion of discrete societies was an “academic fiction”: “the ethnographer has often only managed to discern the existence of ‘a tribe’ because he took it as axiomatic that this kind of cultural entity must exist” (291). At almost the same moment J. S. Furnivall published his study of Burma and Indonesia entitled See Chapter 12 Colonial Policy and Practice (1956) in which he introduced the concept of “plural society” to describe the mixed yet segregated social realities in those locations. Burma and Java were not homogeneous societies at all but a jumble of “separate racial sections” which “mix but do not combine” (304), linked (and stratified) by sheer economic interests. One of the other conventions of early anthropology – the peacefulness and stability of traditional societies – was upset by ongoing researches in Africa. Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard had already discovered that various supposed tribes “appear to be an amalgam of different peoples, each aware of its unique origin and history” (1940: 9) and are not always on easy terms with each other. Max Gluckman even more decisively burst the fiction of simple integration of societies in his aptly named Custom and Conflict in Africa, which found that not only are societies not as integrated and harmonious as was once thought but that conflict could actually be the social structure of a society: by way of the contours and variations within a society, “men quarrel in terms of certain of their customary allegiances, but are restrained 68 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES Wagner, Roy. 1975. The from violence through other conflicting allegiances which are also enjoined on them Invention of Culture. by custom” (1956: 2). The simple view of primitive order was forever dashed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. These reports from the field heralded an identity crisis within anthropology that was expressed in such subsequent titles as The Invention of Culture (Wagner 1975), Hobsbawm, Eric and The Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), The Invention of Primitive Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Society (Kuper 1988), and first and perhaps most dramatically Reinventing Tradition. Cambridge: Anthropology (Hymes 1972). These books and others like them shone the spotlight Cambridge University directly on cultural anthropology itself, identifying clearly anthropology’s own Press. “culture” and how its methods, concepts, and assumptions had influenced its Hymes, Dell, ed. 1972 findings and conclusions. Anthropology would subsequently become more self-. Reinventing reflective as it discovered that it was at least in a sense not only science but also Anthropology. New York: literature – that is, a tradition of writing – as in James Clifford and George Marcus’ Random House, Inc. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Along the way, cultural anthropology split into more schools and theoretical camps than ever, as some practitioners returned to the roots of the discipline to reform them while others took inspiration from fields and advances outside of anthropology. Among these elaborations of anthropology are the following. Neo-evolutionism 1. Neo-evolutionism. Leslie White (1949, 1959a, 1959b) and Julian Steward (1950, The mid-twentieth-century 1953) are considered the most prominent thinkers to reintroduce a more revival of focus on the sophisticated version of cultural evolution. White suggested a principle behind the historical development of evolutionary progress of societies, namely the amount and kind of energy it could cultures and societies, as in the work of Leslie White harness and exploit. As societies developed newer and greater sources of energy (from and Julian Steward, which domesticated animals to electricity and nuclear power), not only their economic but generally sought to repair also their other social characteristics would change in correspondence. Steward the failings of nineteenth- contributed the notion of “multilinear” evolution to combat the impression that all century evolutionism by societies evolved in the same manner or that all societies were part of some grand proposing specific processes and a “multilinear” path of cultural evolution. In this view, each particular culture pursued its own change. developmental course, and societies at similar points in their evolution (perhaps due to their similar environments) would exhibit similar cultures. Structuralism 2. Structuralism. Instead of looking back into the heritage of anthropology, Claude The theory (associated Lévi-Strauss looked across at the developing discipline of linguistics for a new most closely with Claude approach to vexing problems like kinship and religion (e.g., the analysis of myth). Lévi-Strauss) that the significance of an item Drawing on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in particular, Lévi-Strauss took the (word, role, practice, belief) notion of culture as a language seriously: language has “bits” or elements (sounds, is not so much in the words, and so on) in structural relationships with each other (that is, “grammar”). particular item but in its The grammatical relations between linguistic elements determine their meaning more relationship to others. In than the individual elements themselves. Therefore, he proposed that we might other words, the “structure” approach anthropological problems in the same way. Rather than looking for the of multiple items and the location of any one in “meaning” of some cultural element – totemism, mother-in-law avoidance, a relation to others is most particular theme in a myth – in the thing itself, he proposed that we look for it in important. the relations between the elements. In other words, if a society has the crocodile for a totem animal, the meaning of that totem is not to be found in the properties of the crocodile but in the system of relationships between the various totem animals and,  THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 69 more importantly, the system of relationships between the social groupings associated with those species. 3. Ethnoscience. Combining two interests of American anthropology in particular Ethnoscience – personality or cognition and classification – ethnoscience, also known as cognitive The anthropological theory or approach that anthropology, sought to examine and expose the mental classification systems that investigates the native shaped local people’s experiences and actions. As formulated by Goodenough (1956), classification systems of Frake (1962), and Tyler (1969) among others, ethnoscience aimed to be more societies to discover the scientific while also pursuing the psychological side of culture, which had always concepts, terms, and been a focus in American cultural anthropology. The point was to bring to light the categories by which they intellectual models of reality that humans have in their heads (often if not usually understand their world. implicitly) that organize their world in specific ways. Thus, the scientific anthropologist would reconstruct the “folk taxonomy” or the “knowledge structure” of a society, which was the skeleton and structure of its entire meaning and action system. 4. Symbolic/interpretive anthropology. In some ways moving in the opposite Symbolic anthropology direction and in other ways very comparable, symbolic anthropology also sought to The school of thought gain access to the deeper meanings of other societies, but it tended to do this through (often associated with Clifford Geertz and Victor “symbols” rather than through taxonomies. Influenced heavily by the philosophies Turner) that the main goal of Suzanne Langer (1942) and Ernst Cassirer (1954) who saw all human thought and of anthropology is to action as mediated by symbols, the meanings of which could not always be described elucidate the meanings rationally, anthropologists like Victor Turner (1967, 1981 ), Clifford Geertz within which humans live (1973), and Sherry Ortner (1973) attempted to identify the “key symbols” that and behave. Rather than functioned as lenses through which people perceived their worlds. It was at least in focusing on institutions and rules, it focuses on symbols part a reaction against Lévi-Straussian structuralism, which posited a single mental and how symbols shape our structure for all human beings and stripped away all of the particulars and context experience and are from anthropological analysis. Geertz coined the phrase “thick description” for the manipulated by people in practice of trying to penetrate to the deep meaning of people’s realities and to present social situations. that meaning in all of its richness and complexity. Anthropological analysis and Turner, Victor W. 1967. description thus became an interpretive or “hermeneutic” exercise, aiming to “read” The Forest of Symbols: a culture and to render its symbols and meanings understandable to us without Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: washing out all of the uniqueness and particularity of the society in question. Cornell University Press. 5. Marxist/critical anthropology. In the second half of the twentieth century espe- Marxist/critical cially, Marxist or “critical” theory exerted a strong pull on cultural anthropology. In anthropology the works of Maurice Bloch (1983), Maurice Godelier (1978), and many others, there The theory, based on the was a new concern for issues of economics, class, power, and domination. Working work of Karl Marx, which emphasizes the material and from the Marxian claim that the culture of a society is the culture of the dominant economic forces that class of that society, they looked for practical and material relationships that underlie society, relying on shaped the ideologies and institutions of any social group. A key concept was “mode notions of power and of production,” the means and relationships of the production of goods and inequality, modes of wealth, which led to and shaped the “relations of production,” that is, the actual production, and class relations and conflicts. social relationships between individuals and groups like ownership and property relations, kinship and gender relations, and so on. This perspective emphasized and See Chapter 7 actively looked for competitive or conflictual relations in society in a way that early 70 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES Cultural materialism anthropology did not and perhaps could not, with its perspective of integration and The theory that practical/ homogeneity. While it claimed to be scientific and practical, it also tended to be material/economic factors abstract and “theoretical” (even inventing a new word for practice – “praxis”) and can explain some or all cultural phenomena. often openly partisan and critical of existing values and institutions. 6. Cultural materialism. Championed especially by Marvin Harris in popular writings Harris, Marvin. 1974. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: like Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1974) and technical books like The Rise of The Riddles of Culture. Anthropological Theory (1968) and Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of New York: Random Culture (1979), this perspective extended the ecological views of White and Steward House. as well as the Marxist view, basing cultural behaviors firmly on “the practical Feminist anthropology problems of earthly existence” posed by the encounter between “womb and belly” on The anthropological theory one hand and the material world of food, climate, and competition for territory or or approach that focuses on offspring on the other (Harris 1979). Like ethnoscience it aimed at a more scientific how gender relations are anthropology, exposing the “causes” of human action. constructed in society and how those relations 7. Feminist anthropology. A feminist approach to anthropology also appeared in subsequently shape the the 1970s as a reaction to male-centered perceptions of the field and its literature society. Also examines how (“man the hunter” type approaches, and so on). Happily, from early in its history gender concepts have affected the science of women have played a prominent role in cultural anthropology (as evidenced by anthropology itself – the Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Cora Dubois, to name a few), but a literature questions it asks and the on women and their activities across cultures had been lacking, partly because issues it emphasizes. many cultures have sex-segregated knowledge which male anthropologists could Rosaldo, Michelle and not access. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (1974) and Rayna Reiter (1975b) Louise Lamphere, eds. were three of the early founders of the movement to explore gender relationships, 1974. Women, Culture, gender inequalities, and the participation of women in cultures where that partici- and Society. Stanford: pation had been overlooked or minimized. Feminist anthropology does not focus Stanford University Press. Reiter, Rayna, ed. 1975b. exclusively on women but rather on gender diversity and gender issues broadly Toward an Anthropology of conceived. Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. Finally, one of the most exciting and promising new directions is the emergence of a world anthropologies perspective, the recognition that, just as there are many World anthropologies diverse cultures in the world, there are many diverse ways to do anthropology. The The perspective that fact is, as the editors of the recent volume entitled World Anthropologies explain, the anthropology as developed existence and practices of various local anthropologies, especially in the non-Western and practiced in the West is not the only form of world, means that “the idea of a single or general anthropology is called into question” anthropology, and that (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006: 1). Indeed, anthropology as it has been traditionally other societies may develop known and done has, it turns out, been distinctly Western, and world anthropologies and practice other types of promises to expand anthropology while “provincializing Europe” – not denying anthropology based on their or denigrating the Western perspective but showing conclusively that Western specific experiences and thought, and with it anthropological thought as it has so far existed, “are particular interests. and historically located, not universal as is generally assumed” (3–4). Happily, www.wcaanet.org organizations like the World Council of Anthropological Associations, representing anthropologists from Africa, Latin America, Europe, North America, and Asia, embody and advance just such a global prospect. THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 71 BOX 3.3 CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL CONTROVERSIES: THE AMERICAN “SOCIAL CONTRACT” The U.S. Declaration of Independence states that humans are born with certain rights; that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”; and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” These words may be seen as asserting that government and perhaps society in general is a contract – political and other institutions are not natural or divinely inspired but made by humans. So, if a prior contract becomes unsatisfactory, or if it is abused and usurped by those in power, it can be modified or even replaced. Some people respond that at least certain institutions (like marriage or family) are too important or “real” to tamper with, while others think that the whole notion of the human construction of culture undermines the authority of society and tradition. What do you think? SUMMARY Anthropology is a new science and an unlikely science, and it is new because it is unlikely. If people had thought to do anthropology – that is, the study of human diversity – as easily as they thought to do history or algebra, then they would have done it long ago. The two main barriers to an “anthropological perspective” were always, and continue to be: certainty in one’s own correctness and goodness no information or poor information about others. Western civilization like all others suffered from these two limitations, although there had always been a somewhat dissatisfied and self-critical tendency in it. However, a series of experiences around the early 1500s shattered forever that certainty while providing a new quantity and quality of experience of the Other. These included: voyages of discovery to new lands encounters with other “advanced” civilizations the Renaissance the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution. While European societies first struggled with and tried to assimilate these new cultures, they also began to use them for purposes of their own imagination – in particular, to imagine alternatives (whether positive or negative) to their 72 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES own contemporary social and cultural realities. Hobbes and Rousseau were two of the first to do so, with diametrically opposed results. Even so, the first steps toward taking other cultures seriously were taken. Early “anthropological” thinkers typically came from a historical and “progressivist” direction, interested in the origins of culture (or Culture) and the stepwise “progress” of culture from “primitive” to “modern.” However, the first modern anthropologists, like Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, rejected this approach and adopted a more empirical, relativistic, holistic, and humanistic stance. The main thing was to collect good data and use those data to understand cultures as we found them – not as they (allegedly) once were or as we would like them to be. Since those early days, anthropology has altered as its subjects have altered, referring back to its origins, looking for models from other fields, and studying itself with the same tools and the same intensity as it studies other cultures. Anthropology will continue to grow and change for these same reasons. What the anthropology of the future will look like is as hard to predict as – and will depend critically upon – the cultures of the future. Key Terms Cultural evolutionism Neo-evolutionism Cultural materialism Noble savage Diffusion Structuralism Ethnoscience Symbolic anthropology Feminist anthropology World anthropologies Marxist/critical anthropology