Anthropology. Anthropology in the United States had its professional inception around 1900 with the foundation of the first chair in this field at Columbia University. Its intellecutal origins were closely wedded to an evolutionary paradigm, as in the nineteenth century works of Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry
Morgan. By treating human differences as correlates of evolutionary stages, instead of analyzing them deductively from a universal human nature, they offered a way of reformulating the notion of human unity; cultural differences represented different stages of one evolutionary process. The critical conceptual difference that distinguishes these early ethnologists from the professional anthropology that followed was their view of “culture” as a unitary human product, rather than as a token of human diversity.
In the United States, the legacy of evolutionism continued almost unbroken through the twentieth century, particularly through the works of Julian Steward and Leslie White in the 1930s and 1940s. Alert to the “unfashionable” nature of the idea of cultural evolution, Steward therefore largely promoted it as a way to achieve conceptual rigor with regard to the classification of phenomena and as a means to picture historical change or process. Both Steward and White were concerned to show conceptual differences with biological evolution and the superior explanatory potential of cultural evolution as compared to cultural relativism. The critical contrast with biological evolution was held to be the attribution of qualitative difference to successive evolutionary stages, and the concept of “multilinear evolution,” that is, the search for parallels of limited occurrence, not universals of human history.
Early on, evolutionist ideas were challenged by more particularist and relativist notions of anthropology. The internal colonialism of Native peoples that was still being practiced at the turn of the century was the backdrop against which ethnography was initially undertaken in the United States, in order to salvage knowledge of cultural forms before they disappeared. As a result, the close analysis of specific cultures, evinced in the works of Karl Kroeber, Franz
Boas, Margaret
Mead, and Robert Lowie during the 1920s and 1930s, was seen as the proper realm of anthropology, which was thereby restricted to in‐depth description of particular ethnographic contexts, rather than the comparative and diachronic project that evolutionary theories had implied.
Until the 1960s this remained the intellectual agenda of U.S. anthropology, which largely ignored the emergence of both functionalism and structuralism in Europe. Steward's ideas about cultural evolution were fruitfully married to the notion of ecology by a number of anthropologists, notably Robert Netting, Roy Rappaport, and Andrew Vayda. Intellectual connections with archaeological anthropology were very strong among such theorists since archaeologists had always been concerned with the longer time scales in which evolutionary theorists tend to deal.
Evolutionary theories also influenced cultural materialist anthropologists, who espoused a depoliticized version of Marxist theory that gave causal primacy to the productive “base” over the contingent expression of those economic relationships as society and culture, or “superstructure.” Morton Fried, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins all produced major works on the political evolution of bands, tribes, and states, while Marvin Harris provided both a critique of anthropological theory and a didactic demonstration of how cultural materialism could explain the “riddles” of culture, such as food taboos.
Anthropology was central to the wider intellectual changes in the academy at the end of the twentieth century, both as exemplar of the limitations of social science, as in the critique of modernism, and as an innovative practitioner of the humanities, as in the critique of ethnographic writing and representation. The integration of history with anthropology occurred through recognition of the ways global colonial encounters had already induced fundamental social and cultural changes in the non‐European world that preceded ethnographic recording. Culture change and its relation to western colonialism was therefore much emphasized, as in the work of Eric Wolf, but with a new stress on the symbiotic nature of cultural encounters, and an interest in delineating the role of individual agency in such processes.
This stress on the individual also engendered interest in the notion of “performance.” Myth, ritual, history, and society are actually witnessed ethnographically as particular performances. An appreciation of the way such discrete performances feed structural changes provided a key conceptual link with earlier theory, as in the work of Sahlins. In sum, the process of colonialism produced mutually entangled histories that the old small‐scale, village‐based ethnographies could not witness or describe. At the same time came an increased emphasis on individual agency within sociocultural structures that are also to be understood in the actors', not the observers', own terms.
The idea of symbolic structure was retained to explicate the coordination of cultural proclivities and historical actions, as in the work of Victor Turner on “communitas.” But Emiko Ohnuki‐Tierney showed that symbolic transformation itself cannot be adequately explained without reference to wider historical transformations, especially colonialism. The relation between these symbolic and historical transformations was stressed by Sahlins who demonstrated the importance of knowing the actual impact of different ways of symbolizing history on historical actions.
From literary and political critiques of the genre of ethnographic writing, as in the work of George Marcus, Michael Fisher, and Clifford Geertz, it became apparent that anthropology needed to recognize more generally that nonwestern forms of cultural and historical consciousness were present in the performance of myth, ritual, and the plastic arts. The legacy of European structuralism was the canard that nontextual societies were historically “cold,” but among Africanists dealing with an extant indigenous historiography this was not the case, as Jan Vansina had already shown in his work on the oral transmission of historical data.
With the issue of “representation” to the fore, literary and epistemological analyses of ethnographic writing, and its relation to colonialism, increasingly influenced debate. The works of Sherry Ortner, Richard Price, Michael Taussig, and Michael Herzfield displayed just this mix of a theoretical concern with the lingering intellectual legacy of colonialism and the need for new forms of ethnographic and historiographic representation in order fully to slough it off. So, too, the interest in performance led to a productive line of enquiry that dealt with the nature of discourse as a symbolic and semiotic act, as in the works of Ellen Basso, Jonathan Hill, and Greg Urban. Trends as the century closed suggested that this phase of experimentation had given way to the confident practice of a more historically alert and humanistic anthropology.
See also
Education: Rise of the University;
Evolution, Theory of;
Modernist Culture;
Postmodernism;
Social Science.
Bibliography
Julian Steward , Basin‐Plateau Aboriginal Socio Political Groups, 1938.
Roy Rappaport , Pigs for the Ancestors, 1968.
Marshall Sahlins , Stone Age Economics, 1972.
Clifford Geertz , The Interpretation of Culture, 1973.
G. Marcus and and M. Fisher , Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 1986.
Richard Price , Alabi's World, 1991.
Neil L. Whitehead
