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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Throughout the twentieth century, social anthropology has given the impression of being a science that is eternally in the throes of birth, all the while wondering whether it has the right to exist. As it has taken root, developed, and subdivided, it has become increasingly doubt-ridden. Today this self-doubt seems to have reached critical proportions: it is difficult to see how this discipline can continue to emphasize its schizophrenia without completely falling apart. Researchers who wish to sustain a belief in the potential scientific vocation of anthropology feel obliged to seek assistance from the outside; for this help they look to the thermodynamics of heat, the selfish gene, or the newly-formed coalition of “cognitive sciences” (which combines the traditionally attractive capabilities of formal logic, psychophysiology, neurology, and so forth). Such researchers prefer second-hand knowledge to ephemeral knowledge. As for anthropologists who seek to preserve the professional autonomy of their practice at any cost, most of them believe that the only way to do that is to abdicate: to hell with the mirage of objectivity, down with laws, and long live the “text”!
1. A choice example of this discordance can be found in a recent debate: see Tim O'Meara, "Causation and the Struggle for a Science of Culture," with com ments by Marvin Harris, in Current Anthropology 38 (1997), pp. 399-418.
2. Marshall Sahlins, "Culture, ….," The New York Review of Books (23 November 1978); Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Cri tique of Sociobiology (London, 1977); Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, a collection of texts (Paris, 1950).
3. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: or, The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes tr. E. Ray Lankester (New York, 1892; from the 8th German edition; 1st ed. 1868).
4. George Evelyn Hutchinson, The Ecological Theater and the Evolutionary Play (new Haven, 1965). For a general overview, the reader is referred to two arti cles devoted to this concept in a collection of essays: James R. Griesemer, "Niche: Historical Perspectives," and Robert K. Colwell, "Niche: a bifurcation in the conceptual lineage of the term," in Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, eds., Keywords in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992), pp. 231-240 and pp. 241-248.
5. See for example Claude-Marcel Hladik, "Les stratégies alimentaires des Pri mates," in J.-J. Roeder and J. R. Anderson, eds., Primates: recherches actuelles (Paris, 1990), pp. 35-52.
6. On the theme of the ecological strategy of complementarity between species of monkeys in a forest, see in particular A. Gautier-Hion, R. Qris, and J.-P Gautier, "Monospecific vs. Polyspecific Life: A Comparative Study of Forag ing and Antipredatory Tactics in a Community of Cercopithecus Monkeys," Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (1983),12, pp. 325-335.
7. This distinction is examined from an anthropological standpoint in Georges Guille-Escuret, "La niche écologique contre l'écosystème et l'intervention nég ligée des faits techniques," Anthropology et Sociétés 20, no. 3 (1996), pp. 85-105.
8. In fact, he had begun to tackle the subject already in 1957 in the conclusion to a symposium: George E. Hutchinson, "Concluding Remarks," Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology 22, pp. 415-427.
9. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (New York, 1979; 1st ed., 1968). DeVore, who was later to vigorously champion Wilson's sociobiol ogy, had also just published one of the first collections of scholarship on pri matology in the field: Irven de Vore, ed., Primate Behavior: Field Studies of Monkeys and Apes (New York, 1965).,
10. In anthropology, the century has been dominated by three national academic communities: British, French, and then American. The principal reason for this is to be found in colonial history, with the capacity of these three coun tries to develop an ethnology that spanned the five continents. It goes without saying that this remark is in no way intended to pass judgment on the quality of research produced by other universities: Britain, France, and the United States owe their historical preeminence only to their positioning as crossroads of ethnographic data, a situation that was highly conducive to developing general programs and comparative methodologies, as well as to stabilizing rival schools. In a very schematic way, the empirical technicism of the British long stood in opposition to French theoreticism, whereas the United States emphasized an internal conflict (particularly through the Nature/Nurture controversy) which gave (and still gives) the impression of reproducing the rivalry between the French and the British on a larger scale.
11. For a less lapidary exposition, see Jean-Luc Jamard, Anthropologies françaises en perspective. Presque-Sciences et autres histoires (Paris, 1993).
12. In Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Regard éloigné (Paris, 1983); tr. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss The View from Afar (New York, 1985).
13. Jacques Barrau, "Histoire naturelle et anthropologie," L'espace géographique 6, no. 3 (1977), pp. 203-209.
14. Emile Durkheim, "Société," published in 1917 in André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, in Emile Durkheim, Textes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1975), p. 71.
15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris, 1967; 1st. ed. 1949); tr. James Haule Bill, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston, 1969).
16. The texts are included in André Georges Haudricourt, La Technologie, science humaine: recherches d'histoire et d'ethnologies des techniques (Paris, 1987). See in particular "Aspects qualitatifs des civilisations agricoles de la société de com munauté primitive," pp. 299-300.
17. Yutaka Tani, "Domestic Animal as a Serf: Ideologies of Nature in the Mediter ranean and the Middle East," in R. Ellen and K. Fukui, eds., Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture, and Domestication (Oxford, 1996), pp. 387-415.
18. André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964-65); Gesture and Speech, tr. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993).
19. Dan Sperber, La Contagion des idées: théorie naturaliste de la culture (Paris, 1996), p. 135; Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford and Cam bridge, Massachusetts, 1996).
20. Georges Guille-Escuret, Le Décalage humain: le fait social dans l'évolution (Paris, 1994).
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