3 - History of Anthropology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
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).
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences , pp. 62 - 98Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
. 2009. Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
. 1995. “On Ethnography: Storytelling or Science?” Current Anthropology 36.1:97–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2008. “‘The Intimate Politics’ of Fieldwork: Monica Hunter and her African Assistants, Pondoland and the Eastern Cape, 1931–1932,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34.3:557–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and , eds. 2013. Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters. Cambridge and Capetown: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2003. Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
. 1992. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2002. “First Recipients of Anthropological Doctorates in the United States, 1891–1930,” American Anthropologist n.s. 104.2:551–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1997. The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
. 2002. “The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers,” American Anthropologist 104.2:463–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ed. 2008. Other People’s Anthropologies: Ethnographic Practice on the Margins. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
. 2003. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
2011. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2003. “Ethnology and Colonial Administration in Nineteenth-Century British India: The Question of Native Crime and Criminality,” British Journal for the History of Science 36.2:201–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2003. “Spectacles of (Human) Nature: Commercial Ethnography between Leisure, Learning, and Schaulust.” In Worldly Provincialism in the Age of Empire, ed. and Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 127–55.Google Scholar
. 1988. “Kroeber’s Theory of Culture Areas and the Ethnology of Northwestern California,” Anthropological Quarterly 61.1:15–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1966. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2003. “Keeping Biological Anthropology in Anthropology, and Anthropology in Biology,” Current Anthropology 105.1:6–15.Google Scholar
2011. “Introduction.” In Field Notes on Nature and Science, ed. . Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and , 1999. “Foreword.” In , Franz Boas: The Early Years. 1859–1906. Seattle: University of Washington Press, vii–viii.Google Scholar
. 2004. “Using the History of the Chicago Tradition of Sociology for Empirical Research,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 595:157–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1980. The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530–1880. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
1981. “Son of Seven Sexes: The Social Destruction of a Physical Phenomenon,” Social Studies of Science 11.1:33–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and . 1988. “On the Founding Fathers, Fieldwork and Functionalism: A Conversation with Isaac Schapera,” American Ethnologist 15.3:554–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1997. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
2011. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
1964. Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1990. Constructing the Subject. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1977. “History of Anthropology in Historical Perspective,” Annual Review of Anthropology 6:399–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1998. “Toward a History of Canadian Departments of Anthropology: Retrospect, Prospect, and Common Cause,” Anthropologica 40.2:153–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1998. “Wittgenstein and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 22:171–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and . 1944. “Some Principles of Stratification,” American Sociological Review 10:242–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and . 2010. “‘The Truth in Anthropology Does Not Travel First Class’: Reo Fortune’s Fateful Encounter with Margaret Mead,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 6:66–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1995. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
. 2013. “How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist,” New York Times Magazine, February 13.Google Scholar
. 1991. “Anthropology and the Development Encounter,” American Ethnologist 18.4:658–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2010. Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
. 1999. “‘Communities of Blood’: The Natural History of Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41.2:215–62.Google Scholar
2004. “The Jewish Roots and Routes of Anthropology,” Anthropological Quarterly 77.1:107–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1975. “An Appraisal of Modern Social Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 4:1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2009. “Figuring Out Ethnography.” In Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be, ed. and . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 167–83.Google Scholar
. 2009. Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s. Princeton,NJ, andOxford: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1999. “Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,” American Anthropologist n.s. 101.4:731–45.Google Scholar
. 1883. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
. 2003. “Richard Lee: The Politics, Art and Science of Anthropology,” Anthropologica 45.1:19–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1914. “In Memoriam: Alexander Francis Chamberlain,” American Anthropologist n.s. 16.2:337–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2010. Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
. 2007. “Liberalism in Imperial Anthropology: Notes on an Implicit Paradigm in Continental European Anthropology before World War I,” Ab Imperio 1.7:224–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2010. “Alliances and Avoidance: British Interactions with German-speaking Anthropologists’ Accounts.” In Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists. ed. , and . Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 19–31Google Scholar
2003. “Anthropological Fieldwork at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Crisis and Location of Knowledge,” Anthropos 98.2:473–87.Google Scholar
. 1995. The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1988. “Apartheid’s Anthropologists: The Genealogy of Afrikaner Anthropology,” American Ethnologist 15.3:535–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1989. “The White Man’s Burden: Ersatz Customary Law and Internal Pacification in South Africa,” Journal of Historical Sociology 2.1:41–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1997. “ ‘Mr. Neville Did All in [His] Power to Assist Me’: A. P. Elkin, A. O. Neville and Anthropological Research in Northwestern Australia, 1927–1928,” Oceania 68.1:27–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2007. A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.Google Scholar
and . 2011. “Establishing Anthropology and Maori Language (Studies), Auckland University College: The Appointment of Ralph Piddington, 1949.” Histories of Anthropology Annual 7:49–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. January 9, 2011. “What If They Gave a Science War and Only One Side Came? Ask the American Anthropological Association,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. downloaded from .
2004. “Anthropology in Area Studies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33:499–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, with the assistance of . 1910. History of Anthopology. New York and London: G. Putnam’s Sons.Google Scholar
. 1994. “Critiques of Anthropology: Literary Turns, Slippery Bends,” Poetics Today 15.3:341–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Crowell.Google Scholar
. 1989. “The Effects of CRM: A Sociohistorical Perspective of the Department of Anthropology, University of Nebraska at Lincoln,” The Plains Anthropologist 34.124 (Part 1):111–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and . 2006. “Fieldwork and Writing from the Field.” In Dispatches from the Field, ed. Andrew M. Gardner and David M. Hoffman. Long Grove,IL: Waveland Press, 1–13.Google Scholar
. 1976. “Status and Exchange in the Profession of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist n.s. 78.2:272–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2002. “The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896–1905,” American Anthropologist n.s. 104.2:520–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, , and , eds. 2010. Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones: World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe. Bielefeld: transcript.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1968. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
. 1991. “Speaking about Hidden Times: The Anthropology of V. Y. Mudimbe,” Callaloo 14.4:944–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and . 2000. “From Flexible Bodies to Fluid Minds: An Interview with Emily Martin,” Ethnos 27.2:247–82.Google Scholar
. 1973. “A ‘Scientific Revolution’: Sociological Theory in the United States, 1930–1945,” Sociological Inquiry 43.1:3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1991. The Savage Within: The Social Context of British Anthropology, 1885–1945. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2011. “Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology,” Isis 102.1:1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2012. “The Theory of Evolution and Cultural Anthropology.” In The Theory of Evolution and Its Impact, ed. . Heidelberg and New York: Springer Verlag, 83–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and , eds. 1996. Science in the Field, a special issue of Osiris n.s. 11.
. 1973. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
1984. “Glimpses of the Unmentionable in the History of British Social Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 13:1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
1988. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
2008. Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
, and . 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
. 2008. “Race across the Physical Cultural Divide in American Anthropology.” In A New History of Anthropology, ed. . Oxford/Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 242–58.Google Scholar
. 1997. Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.Google Scholar
2007. “New Wine in New Bottles: Prospects and Pitfalls of Cultural Primatology,” Journal of Anthropological Research 63.2:167–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2003. “Quantifying the Discipline: Some Anthropology Statistics from the UK,” Anthropology Today 19.3:19–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1988. “‘It Is Besides a Pleasant English Word’: Ruth Benedict’s Concept of Patterns,” Anthropological Quarterly 61.1:27–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1914. The Influence of Anthropology on the Course of Political Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
. 1970. “Editor’s Introduction.” In, Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society [originally published in 1936], ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, xiii–xcixGoogle Scholar
1999. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1994. Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
, and . 1983. “Notes for a History of Peruvian Anthropology, 1940–1980,” Current Anthropology 24.3:343–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1981. “Imperialism, Anthropology, and the Third World,” Economic and Political Weekly, April 4:623–7.Google Scholar
1995. “Kinship Studies in Late Twentieth-Century Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24:343–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and . 1971. “Peter Du Ponceau’s Contributions to Anthropology,” Ethnohistory 18.2:147–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2003. “Frank Speck and the Moisie River Incident: Anthropological Advocacy and the Question of Aboriginal Fishing Rights in Quebec,” Anthropologica 45.1:129–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2011. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1989. Untitled review of The Anthropologist as Author by and Tales of the Field. On Writing Ethnography by , Symbolic Interaction 12.1:171–3.
. 2007. The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
. 1981. “Anthropology and Sociology: Three Common Problems,” Anthropological Quarterly 54.1:28–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2009. The Infanticide Controversy. Primatology and the Art of Field Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Evolution and Fate of Botanical Field Books.” In Field Notes on Nature and Science, ed. . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 187–200.
1976. “A Look at Academic Anthropology: Through a Graph Darkly,” American Anthropologist n.s. 78.2:829–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2003. The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
. 2008. “The Metamorphosis of Ethnology in France, 1839–1930.” In A New History of Anthropology, ed. . Oxford/Malden, MA: Blackwell, 98–110Google Scholar
2012. “‘A Useless Colonial Science’? Practicing Anthropology in the French Colonial Empire, circa 1880–1960,” Current Anthropology 53.4:583–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2008. “Applied Anthropology.” In A New History of Anthropology, ed. . Oxford/Malden, MA: Blackwell,326–40.Google Scholar
. 1978. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 Vols. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1999. “Science, Commerce, and Control: Patronage and the Development of Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas,” American Anthroplogist, New Series 101.2:256–71.Google Scholar
. 1981. “The Rise of Academic Physical Anthropology in the United States (1880–1980): A Historical Overview,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 56.4:353–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2000. “British Social Anthropology. A Retrospective,” Annual Review of Anthropology 29:1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2011. “What Ends with the End of Anthropology?” In The End of Anthropology? Ed. and . Wantage, UK: Sean Kingston, 61–80.Google Scholar
. 1981. “The Anthropologist as a Young Physicist: Bronislaw Malinowski’s Apprenticeship,” Isis 72.4:613.620.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2011. Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859–1914 and Beyond. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.Google Scholar
1960. “Obituary: Alfred Louis Kroeber 1876–1960,” American Ethnography Quasimonthly. Downloaded from .
, Jr. 1965. “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1.3:211–18.3.0.CO;2-W>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, 1992. The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
, 2010. Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
, , and , eds. 1999. The New Physical Anthropology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
2005. “Anthropology at the University of Arizona, 1893–2005,” Journal of the Southwest 47.3:327–74.Google Scholar
. 1864. “The Origins of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of Natural Selection,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2:clviii–clxxxvii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and . 1989. “Anthropology and Development in Bangladesh,” Urban Anthropology 18.3–4:241–64.Google Scholar
1951. “The New Physical Anthropology,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 13 series II.7:298–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
1982. Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
. 2004. Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1864–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
. 2001. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 5
- Cited by