THEORIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY: AN INTIMATE LEARNING WITH THE 'OTHER'

2022

What is anthropological theory and why should we care? Anthropologists develop theory to make sense of processes still unfolding and for which outcomes are unclear. At the same time, theory shapes what we notice and find important in ethnographic or archival research. What do we think the most decisive forces shaping the reality we are studying? Should we focus on culture, class, race, gender, or some combination? Theory allows us to make sense of, and coherently write about, these different aspects of reality in any topic we hope to understand and write about. In this course we will read both classic works that shaped the discipline and emerging work today—always with implications for our own research projects in mind. What is the relationship of ethnography to theory? How is anthropology grounded in social theory and political economy of the early 20th century? How have anthropologists deployed key concepts of “culture,” “social structure,” “power,” “colonialism,” or “racial capitalism” to make sense of human universals and the ubiquity of difference? How can we mobilize anthropological theory and concepts to make sense of the world—and our own research projects—today?

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1984

Every year, around the time of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the New York Times asks a Big Name anthropologist to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of the field. These pieces tend to take a rather gloomy view. A few years ago, for example, Marvin Harris suggested that anthropology was being taken over by mystics, religious fanatics, and California cultists; that the meetings were dominated by panels on shamanism, witchcraft, and “abnormal phenomena”; and that “scientific papers based on empirical studies” had been willfully excluded from the program (Harris 1978). More recently, in a more sober tone, Eric Wolf suggested that the field of anthropology is coming apart. The sub-fields (and sub-sub-fields) are increasingly pursuing their specialized interests, losing contact with each other and with the whole. There is no longer a shared discourse, a shared set of terms to which all practitioners address themselves, a shared language we all, however idio...

SCDC, 1893

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Constructing knowledge: authority and critique in social …, 1991

This book began to take shape in December 1988. The setting was the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. A conference was held in memory of the anthropologist Bob Scholte, whose sudden death in the preceding year shook his students and colleagues profoundly. The Conference was intended to follow lines of critical and reflexive inquiry initiated by, among others, Scholte himself. It appeared to be a particularly auspicious moment for such an event, as critical, feminist and symbolic perspectives in anthropology seemed to converge. Political critique, reflexive analysis and the experience of multiple voices had combined to produce doubts about the authority of the anthropological expert, whose line of descent includes sexist, racist and imperialist ancestors. As anthropological authority was questioned and the anthropologist's voice toned down, there seemed to be a promise for a conversation with other voices.

JOURNAL-ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, 2006

In January 2006, the international community of anthropologists was confronted with a surprising piece of news. France's principal funding body, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), was contemplating striking anthropology out of its disciplinary list, attributing to it a subsidiary position within the field of history. A heated debate ensued concerning anthropology's independent position within the CNRS funding structure. One does not know whether it was thought that anthropology always had been a branch of history or whether it was thought that it always should have been or, alternatively, if the idea was that it was simply irrelevant! Ultimately, in the face of national and international outcry, the proposal was dropped and the change was not implemented. We were all very pleased about that outcome. Many of us, however, remained preoccupied by it all, feeling that a misunderstanding on that scale should not be treated as an isolated event. Rather, it should be seen as a sign that the public understanding of anthropology is not what it should be, that the issue is in bad need of further debate. 1 How ironic that this mishap should have occurred on the turf of Marcel Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, where modern anthropology was born! Now, let it be clear from the start that anthropologists have nothing against history or historians -to the contrary. Never has the dialogue between the two disciplines been richer than over the past two decades. Their disciplinary history, however, remains radically distinct. Their contributions to the humanities and the social sciences are not in competition; rather they are mutually indispensable parts of the more general socio-scientific field that modernity has launched.

Anthropology is a discipline very conscious of its history, and Alan Barnard has written a clear, balanced, and judicious textbook that surveys the historical contexts of the great debates in the discipline, tracing the genealogies of theories and schools of thought and considering the problems involved in assessing these theories. The book covers the precursors of anthropology; evolutionism in all its guises; diVusionism and culture area theories, functionalism and structuralfunctionalism; action-centred theories; processual and Marxist perspectives; the many faces of relativism, structuralism and post-structuralism; and recent interpretive and postmodernist viewpoints.

CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES, 2015

It is a necked reality that theory is the core of anthropology. Theories determine the types of questions anthropologists ask and the sorts of information they collect. Without a solid understanding of the history of theory, anthropological data remain a collection of ‘exotic ethnographic vignettes’. With knowledge of theory, these vignettes become attempts to answer critical philosophical and practical problems. Thus, it is critical that anthropologists understand the theory and its historical context. Students face two choices, then, if they wish to understand the theoretical perspectives that ultimately drive ethnographic fieldwork: They can read classic theoretical articles or they can read someone's interpretations of those articles. For readers who are not well versed in anthropological theory, neither choice is ideal. As a professional discipline anthropology is a subject in which theory is of great importance. It is also a subject in which theory is closely bound up with practice. Anthropological theory may be compared to a large crossroads with busy traffic and a few, temporarily employed traffic policemen who desperately try to force the unruly traffic to follow the rules. (There are, it must be admitted, a number of minor crashes and other accidents almost every day.) Or it could be described, more harmoniously, as a coral reef, where the living corals literally build upon the achievements of their deceased predecessors. Put differently; during the approximately 100 years that have passed since modern anthropology was established in the USA, Britain and France, many general theories have been proposed, become fashionable in and sometimes outside of anthropology, have been fiercely debated and challenged, and have disappeared, often almost without leaving visible traces.

Anthropological Forum, 2019

The event aimed to explore a variety of perspectives concerning the production and the ownership of anthropological knowledge, including issues of authority and ethical responsibility. We also welcomed reflections on the opening of new interstitial fieldsites in between the structured components of anthropological research. Our interest focused on the dilemmas arising from the definition of the field itself, in the guise of the epistemological delimitation of its boundaries and how these affect the relational world within it. We focused on the co-dependence between these factors and on the influence of increasing interconnectedness through advanced and progressively widespread communication technologies (cf. Kelty 2009).

2001

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 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