18 - Robin Horton

Summary

“African Traditional Thought and Western Science. Part II”

Robin Horton (b. 1932) is an anthropologist who did his main ethnographic work among the Kalahari in Nigeria (see his The Gods as Guests[1960], which ends on observing the “truncation of religious practice” [71] as a result the Pax Britannica and the spread of Christianity). Horton worked at several Nigerian universities. With Meyer Fortes he co-authored a book on Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959); but Horton's main writing took the form of articles, the most important of which are collected in his book Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science (1993), where he also defends some of his arguments against critics.

Together with Ruth Finnegan he edited the influential volume Modes of Thought (1973) on the question of whether Western and non-Western thinking are fundamentally different. Much of Horton's work focuses on this issue; but as he explains in the introduction to his Patterns of Thought, he is interested in the modern West mainly as a contrasting case to African cultures and religions and to illuminate the questions of universality and uniqueness of different styles of thinking. Reflecting on Western thought also made it clear to him how strongly anthropologal work was shaped by Western educational and ideological background assumptions. Against theological and symbolist approaches, which, in Horton's view, divide human thought into two main categories - the expressive and the instrumental – he sided with the intellectualist or pragmatist tradition that emphasizes the quest for practical control and explanatory schemes.