3 - History of Anthropology

Summary

This essay is concerned primarily with the literature on the history of sociocultural anthropology, which is by far the largest of anthropology’s subfields. It also emphasizes anglophone anthropology, which dominated the entire discipline until relatively recently. My aim will be to indicate how the literature reflects – and has often been intended to shape – a particular disciplinary structure. To this end, I will examine what George Stocking termed “presentist” and “historicist” approaches, the diverse styles and viewpoints of scholars who have contributed to the literature, as well as the tendency to represent anthropologists as heroes and to rely on oral communications as much as on diverse sorts of written records. The United States has had a distinctive standard department structure, a union of four subfields – sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology (formerly called physical anthropology), archaeology, and linguistic anthropology – a structure that is now becoming less than standard. (The one exception to the generalization that there have been durable four-field departments only in North America – the department at University College, London (UCL) – represents a historical accident). In the United States, the association of biological and sociocultural anthropology has grown increasingly problematic, however. Indeed, the percentage of anthropologists who do biological anthropology is very small; in 1998, for example, only 6.5 percent of the members of the American Anthropological Association were biological anthropologists (Calcano 2003, p. 6). Moreover, despite the conventional expectation that practitioners of all of the discipline’s subfields benefit from contact with one another, in reality there has been relatively little collaboration among practitioners of the subfields (Borofsky 2002). Some practitioners of archaeology belie this generalization, benefiting from research done in all three of the other subfields. And biological and cultural anthropologists often collaborate in such fields as medical anthropology – a specialty that has so many practitioners that it has its own scholarly association. Certainly, Franz Boas, who led American anthropologists to implement the four-field model of the discipline, himself worked in three of the four subfields (he did not do research in archaeology). His first Ph.D. student, Alexander Chamberlain, who earned his doctorate at Clark University in 1892 (the first Ph.D. in anthropology conferred in the United States), wrote a dissertation in linguistic anthropology and worked in cultural anthropology, as well as in folklore (Gilbertson 1914).