I
This paper is drawn in part from the conclusion to the new edition of my Anthropology and Anthropologists (Routledge, 2014).
Reflecting on the 25th anniversary of the founding meeting of the EASA, I will talk about the intellectual issues that were on our minds. They seemed urgent, because we recognized that the discipline was in the throes of a post colonial crisis, particularly in Britain and France, which were still the main intellectual centres of social anthropology.
First of all, having lost their Empires, British and French anthropologists had to find a role. This was not straightforward. They were accused of being ‘Orientalists’ who viewed colonial peoples as objects, and constructed false and mystifying differences. Nationalists charged that their research encouraged tribalism. According to ‘dependency theory’, much favoured by Latin American writers, human lives everywhere were ultimately shaped by multi-national companies. To emphasise local cultural differences was to draw a veil over this deeper reality.
And then an even more fundamental problem had to be faced. The anthropologists needed to think again about the very nature of their scientific object. Colonial natives had once been loosely identified as Primitives. By the 1970s few social anthropologists were using the old idiom of ‘primitives’ or ‘savages’, except in a fit of absentmindedness, or, like Malinowski, ironically, or, like Lėvi-Strauss, with provocative ambiguity. Hardly any would still claim that there was a distinct category of ‘tribal’ societies, for which a special theory had to be constructed. Yet anthropology was associated with the intellectually indefensible and politically unsavoury idea that the colonial peoples were uncivilized, backward, and very different from Europeans. Few anthropologists addressed these popular misconceptions. Perhaps the old notions had even been rather convenient, since they shielded ethnographers from ticklish questions about why they spent so much time in the colonies or, by the 1970s, the former colonies.
And yes, many anthropologists did indeed do their fieldwork in Africa, Oceania and the Amazon. Indeed, as development aid began to flow to the former colonies and in consequence a new applied anthropology emerged, not only in France, Britain and The Netherlands, but even more strongly, and idealistically, in Scandinavia and Germany. So was social anthropology to become a science of “undeveloped countries”? Was this perhaps the new incarnation of the old “primitive society”?
A more considered defense of research priorities was now required. If those folk did not represent a different, tribal world, why were they the privileged subjects for ethnographic research? And if social anthropology did not have its special field of research – a particular type of society and culture – then what could it contribute to the broader discourse of the social sciences?
Three possible answers to these questions were floated, perhaps even three and a half, but none was entirely persuasive. The first option was to insist that social anthropologists had indeed honed special methods for doing research in … not, of course, Heaven forbid, ‘primitive societies’. There was a search for euphemisms – pre-literate peoples, or better still, less patronizing, the Other: the non-western. In any case, the claim was that when it came to these … Other Cultures … anthropologists could draw on a store of accumulated wisdom. In short, social anthropology did possess its own proper subject matter, even if it wasn’t easy to give it a name.
At the extreme there has been a revival of the primitivist project – two in fact – one political, the indigenous peoples’ movement, another, not unrelated, which looks for a social wisdom, in tune with nature and even the supernatural, founded on a pre-modern ontology. Lėvi-Strauss may be the patron saint of this movement, but I do not believe that in either incarnation it represents a fruitful or realistic research programme, perhaps even in the Amazon.
The claim that anthropology was about the exotic other was in any case problematic,
if only because local ethnographers in Asia and Latin America were making studies ‘at home’, although usually in the poorest and most marginal communities in their countries.
A second claim, at variance with the first, was that the ethnographer’s magic could work very well at home, or anyway, quite near to home. Indeed what was termed ethnology in many European countries was exclusively concerned with national traditions. By the 1980s some ethnologists were drawing on models from social anthropology, but without the discipline and perspective of comparison. Yet in any case, switching to doing fieldwork ‘at home’ could hardly represent a new programme for the discipline as a whole, unless social anthropology were to merge with sociology, bringing as a dowry only its questionable copyright on a particular method of collecting data.
Some did seize upon the ethnographic method as a guarantee of the anthropological project. In some quarters a cult of ethnography developed. This might qualify as a half-answer to the question, whither anthropology, but, of course, even ethnologists and sociologists were doing ethnography, and it was hard to justify piling up ethnographies in the absence of a thought-out research programme.
If a cult of ethnography was no real solution, the social anthropologists had to face up to a very big problem, because even more than development studies or ethnology, sociology seemed to threaten the identity and ambition of social anthropology.
Sociology was, of course, a well-established discipline in the USA and in many European countries, but until the 1960s it had only a marginal presence in British universities. Then it suddenly took off, encouraged by a Labour government and fuelled by student demand. Elsewhere in Europe sociological faculties grew by leaps and bounds.
By and large, the social anthropologists beat a retreat in the face of sociology. Sociology was about modern, industrial, western societies. Very well, some anthropologists concluded, social anthropology was to be defined as the science of the Rest, the ‘other cultures’. They also favoured traditional topics of research. Even when their fieldwork took them to societies in the throes of revolutionary change, they typically chose to study cosmologies and kinship systems. Back then to the first answer, the default response, social anthropology as exotica.
A third answer to the question – what are we doing over there? – was that social anthropology represented the comparative wing of the social sciences. It is obviously worth finding out whether social science theories work in other societies. Do their generalisations apply to human beings in general, or only to citizens of Western liberal democracies? ‘Sociological theory,’ Radcliffe-Brown had pronounced, ‘must be based on, and continually tested by, systematic comparison.’i And who but trained ethnographers could put the propositions of the social sciences to the test in other conditions?
II
When we met in Castel Gondolfo it was, I think, evident that, perhaps above all, social anthropology required a fresh theoretical project. Could a starting point be recovered from our established theoretical inventory? After all, anthropologists had ideas about kinship, gender, ritual, classification, taboo, totemism, witchcraft, systems of exchange, patron-client relationships and so on. These were not all pre-modern issues. Many had analogues in all societies. More broadly, culture theory could be identified as an anthropological speciality, though not perhaps with much conviction on the part of British social anthropologists. And those of a structuralist bent might even aspire to work with neuroscientists to complete the project of Lėvi-Strauss and deliver a comparative account of human ways of thinking.
However, The Sixties, a decade of carnival and radical new ideas – still going strong in the 1970s and still just about alive in the 1980s – had been a traumatic period for all the social sciences. The orthodoxies were pummelled, the old authorities ridiculed. The standard theories – functionalism, structural-functionalism, structuralism – were denounced as reactionary, impotent in the face of change, an instrument for social control. The old school was not with the movement. Students demonstrating in Paris in 1968 held up banners proclaiming Structures Do Not Take To The Streets. At the very least, there was a need for new ideas about how societies changed – or entered the modern world, as people put it at the time.
And clearly the old models had nothing to say about social change or about the economic, political and religious currents that swept across national boundaries. The classical models tended to assume that societies and cultures coincided, and that their boundaries were real and rigid, and that they were in a state of equilibrium (though there were exceptions, notably Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Sanuni of Cyrenaica, Leach’s of the Kachin and Ernest Gellner’s of the Berbers of the Atlas mountains in Morocco)ii. Yet while the ethnographer might still be working in a remote village, the villagers were usually well aware that they lived in a larger world.
These weaknesses made social anthropology vulnerable to a Marxist critique, and for a time several departments were consumed by Marxist cargo-cults – some have still not really recovered. But then very suddenly, in the mid 1980s, Glasnost broke out. The mood changed in the West. There was a shift to a more personal politics, a politics of identity and representation. ‘Culture’ became a key word, and within European anthropology some came to feel that perhaps, after all, American anthropology had been right to take ‘culture’ as its subject rather than social structure.
Clifford Geertz was renewing the project of interpretive anthropology, and refining the notion of culture. In the 1980s interpretive anthropology seemed set for a while to sweep the board on both sides of the Atlantic. Even in its British heartlands, social anthropology barely resisted translation into cultural studies (yet another new discipline to threaten their identity). An extreme version of cultural idealism and relativism, the post-modernist cargo cult sprang up in the mid 1980s and swept into European anthropology from the USA. It proclaimed that attempts to understand other people were futile and politically suspect. To many of us gathered in Castel Gondolfo, this seemed to be a serious challenge to our discipline.
The culturalist discourse excluded much that was central to social anthropology. Politics was treated simply as rhetoric. Ethnic identity was merely an ideological construction. Religions were reduced to cosmologies. Kinship was a symbolic statement about shared identity, not a system of working connections on which people depended for dear life. Economics was about conceptions of nature, production and reproduction, but excluded such mundane factors as land law, labour, budgets, or calculations of profit and loss. Ethnographies were, at best, tentative essays in the difficulties of inter-cultural communication.
There is a profound gulf between the culturalists and those anthropologists who regard themselves as social scientists. From the idealist point of view of the culturalists, ways of life are so different as to be incommensurate. Indeed it is almost impossible to grasp how other people see the world. But social anthropologists are interested in the conditions and organization of daily life. They are impressed rather by the recurrence of certain institutions, the limited range of variation, the very common strategic responses to the problems of getting by, making do, rubbing along. An anthropology that situates itself in the social sciences would have a very different agenda to the culturalist programme.
While comparisons may be difficult they are not impossible, and there is very real need for broader perspectives and for better information about how other people manage their lives. Very nearly all research funding in the human sciences is directed to the study of the inhabitants of North America and the European Union. Ninety-six per cent of the subjects of studies reported in the leading American psychology journals are drawn from Western industrial societies.iii These represent a minuscule and distinctly non-random sample of humanity. The leading economics journals publish more papers dealing with the United States than with Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa combined, according to a report in the Economist. And it is a science of the rich. ‘The world’s poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profession’, the report noted.iv
And so new projects are emerging, on a wider stage. Our community of European social anthropologists is becoming more significant than the national traditions that it encompasses. The younger generation shares the classic commitment to Malinowskian fieldwork, but draws on a range of sociological and historical discourses. They engage with European concerns about immigration and ethnicity, but many do fieldwork in societies beyond Europe. A more cosmopolitan discipline is emerging, multi-centred, engaged in a range of current intellectual debates. The social science tradition is reasserting itself.
Young social anthropologists read widely and reflectively in social theory. Their arguments are closely tied to detailed ethnographic observations, but their ethnographies do not describe isolated, bounded, traditional, monocultural societies. Rather, the most exotic communities are presented as part of the wider world, the site of intellectual and political cross currents, echoing to debates and dissension. The most apparently traditional societies are not presented as unchanging, or as mysteriously, or enchantingly, ‘other’. In order to make sense of their world, even the most conservative and apparently isolated people appeal to shifting frames of reference. Nor is this all taken to be a sign of modernity, or a marker of uncomfortable and ill-comprehended change, to be blamed perhaps on a vaguely conceived Neo-Liberalism. Rather, it is the normal state of things, everywhere, at all times. As social anthropology becomes a truly cosmopolitan discipline, a new realism is abroad.
Endnotes (Kuper)
i A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘The comparative method in social anthropology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1951, p. 16.
ii E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Oxford, 1954; E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, London, 1954; Max Gluckman, “Analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand’, Bantu Studies, 1940, 14:1, 1-30. Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas, London, 1969.
iii J. J. Arnett, ‘The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American’, American Psychologist, 2008, 63: pp. 602-614.
iv ‘The useful science?’, Economist, January 4th, 2014.
