Classic Anthropology

Critical Essays, 1944-96

John W. Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781560003335
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351291187
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Classic anthropology is Bennett''s label for the work produced by anthropologists between 1915 and 1955. In this book, Bennett criticises classic anthropology for ne glecting the contemporary world and modern societies. '

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Classic Anthropology: An Introduction

Introduction

In using a term like “Classic anthropology” I am aware of the risks of introducing yet another term with which to pigeonhole a complex and diverse scholarly field. Lowie (1937) focused on schools of thought and their adherents, and Harris, on the whole, did likewise (1968). Stocking (1987) invented “Victorian anthropology,” which includes a major subtype: evolutionary anthropology. And then there is “Boasian anthropology” or “historical particularism.” Penniman (1965) offered four main periods for the modern era, beginning in the late nineteenth century: convergence, construction, critical, and convergence and consolidation. Murray Leaf (1979) divided all Gaul into monistic and dualistic. My Classic era is clearly retrospective: I am looking back on something I experienced as a student and an entering professional, and, on the whole, I admire it and view it with a certain nostalgia. For like all “classic” phenomena—scholarly or automotive—it has a certain integrity.

I suggest that the Classic era had its decisive intellectual beginning in the 1910s, when the implications of Franz Boas’s ideas about Culture led his students to strike out in novel theoretical directions, and continental ideas about Society began surfacing in Britain. It is not hard to argue that Kroeber’s (1917) “Superorganic” paper, however controversial, represents a trendsetting piece of writing for the entire Classic era, or certainly in the United States. For ethnology, I nominate Malinowski’s (1916-48) “Baloma” monograph as the beginning of systematic thinking about the relationship of tribal people to their social milieux (chapter 7). Margaret Mead and Ruth Bunzel, in their 1960 blockbuster anthology, The Golden Age of American Anthropology, gave part 5 of their book the title “Classical Period in American Anthropology, 1900-1920.” However, much of their period would really fall into what I would call the pre-Classic era. Mead and Bunzel were concerned with the origins and development of American anthropology, and while my essays do tend to focus on the American scene, this is so mainly because of the enormous output of material. In addition, Mead and Bunzel were not trying to trace the conceptual or methodological development of the field—they were mainly concerned with the Americanists’s preoccupation with the Native American cultures.

However, Bunzel, in her introduction to the final section of the book, noted that “Around 1920 anthropology began to change. There was a completion and a new beginning—or perhaps several new beginnings, for a crossroads had been reached” (Mead and Bunzell 1960: 574). She states that the “sense of urgency” among the Americans to study and record the ethnography of the Native American groups had given way to a desire to study customs as phenomena in their own right—not merely in a context of particular ethnographic description. The “museum-type” problems of origins and distribution of cultural traits, which dominated the period from 1900, were replaced by an interest in culture change; the role of the individual in culture, including the issues raised by the increasing popularity of psychoanalysis; the nature of values; and a growing awareness that anthropology had a role to play in the diagnosis of problems of modern life. But Bunzel said nothing about functionalism, social-structuralism, the nature of ritual and magic, and other theoretical concerns emerging in European and American anthropology. Nineteen hundred and twenty also could be taken as the date the Americans began to find that other national anthropologies were transcending the purely descriptive ethnological undertaking, influenced by sociology, economics, and other social fields. Thus, one prime characteristic of the Classic era was a convergence of anthropological interests on an international scale.

My terminal date for the Classic era is the mid-1950s, although many developments characteristic of the Classic persisted into later decades. The International Symposium on Anthropology sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 1952 was the major milestone: the names of three American anthropologists stand out in the organization of the Symposium and its aftermath: Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Sol Tax. Kroeber and Kluckhohn were largely responsible for the proceedings volumes, Anthropology Today (Kroeber 1953) and An Appraisal of Anthropology Today (International Symposium on Anthropology 1952); and Tax was a principal figure in the publication of the Yearbook of Anthropology (one issue only, in 1955). In the following year, Tax edited a partial republication of the Yearbook under the title Current Anthropology, and this can be taken as one event in the origin of the now “world journal of anthropology,” under the Current Anthropology title. The plans for the journal were announced in 1957, but the first issue did not appear until 1960.

In other words, the Classic era entered its terminal phase with the publication in the mid-1950s of a series of syntheses and procedural documents which announced that anthropology was to be viewed henceforth as an organized multidiscipline on a worldwide basis. The mid-1950s witnessed not only the inauguration of new ideas and subject matter, but also a revival or reassessment of older anthropological interests. The atmosphere is suggested by a brief comment I wrote for the first issue of Current Anthropology (1960: 1) in response to a flyer sent out by Tax prior to the editorial work on the issue:

[Suggest] dealing with the revival of certain older ideas and approaches—e.g., evolutionism; environmentalism; biological basis of behavior. In my opinion, one of the most significant aspects of contemporary anthropology, at least its historical aspect, is precisely this revival of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approaches and problems—to create, perhaps, the new “general anthropology.” I would think of the task,.. .as a contribution to the history of current anthropology.

Sub-eras of the Classic can be chronological or topical. Emphasizing American developments, in some of the essays I will attempt a three-way chronological-topical classification: an “early Classic,” which is more or less equivalent to the historical anthropology of the 1920s; the “middle Classic,” or the systematic ethnology of the 1930s; and the “late Classic,” or the functionalist anthropology of the 1940s.

Please do not take these classifications and period datings too seriously. They are tags, simplifying complicated trends, and it should be remembered that ideas do not always conform to time periods: new ones usually have remote antecedents, and outworn notions can echo down the corridors of thought forever. Certainly this is the case with my pre-Classic era: the anthropology of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century. During the Boas revolution of the early Classic era this period was identified as the heyday of Evolutionary Theory. However, nearly every major approach which characterized the emerging Classic era had a predecessor of sorts in the pre-Classic: statistical analysis (e.g., Tylor 1888); proto-functionalist explanation (Henry Maine 1861); historical reconstruction (Pitt Rivers 1906); literary analysis (Gomme 1968); cultural psychology (Brinton 1902); and so on. It is true that most problems of the pre-Classic seemed to center around origins and stages of development, but the substantive topics and methods were diverse. Can we say the same for the way the Classic era prefigures and is carried forward in the post-Classic era? I am not sure: we are too close to the contemporary highly diverse developments.

In any event, something very important happened as a result of World War II: the transformation of the isolated, culturally integral tribal society. These people became citizens of new nations, and their cultures tend to become badges of social and political identity rather than expressions of innate ethnicity. This dual development pulled the rug out from under the themes and schemes of Classic anthropology. Not that it matters, particularly. Anthropology, in its new institutional guises (medical, educational, economic, etc.)—and its adventures in the field of literary analysis—seems to flourish despite the transient ambiguity of its central subject matter and theory. But one thing is certain: sociocultural anthropology in the 1990s does not command the attention from scholars in other fields that it did, say, in the late 1930s and 1940s, when it was producing reams of fascinating new data (although other subdivisions of the discipline continue to command attention, particularly human paleontology, precisely because it provides new information and insights on human origins and culture).

The Idea of Relativism

As I define it, most of the Classic era is contained in the period between the two World Wars: a crucial era in modern history since it marked the beginning of the contemporary age of sophisticated technology, advanced communication, and cultural pluralism—and, above all, the dawning of the age of relativism—which we may define as the acceptance by scholars of all forms of human existence and all ideas as more or less equally valid and worthy of serious consideration—at least at the moment of encounter. Relativism also means the objectification of all elements of human existence—anything becomes available for examination. Conventional or traditional values and judgments of validity are (theoretically) discarded as criteria.

As a general idea, relativism in its various forms (see Hatch 1983 for a list and definitions) was an inevitable product of the explosion of scholarship and scientific knowledge beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing down into the nineteenth. The underlying issue was the refutation of Christian or other deterministic ideas about the superiority of particular versions of humanity, made necessary by the accumulating information on tribal peoples and Oriental civilizations. Although the doctrines of superiority of Western and/or industrial civilization persisted, special explanations were invented to rationalize the new knowledge of cultural diversity (which inclined toward relativism) with the residual beliefs about human dominance or the superiority of Western thought and research. The history of the era is really a kind of eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too. Darwinian knowledge demonstrated the membership of Homo sapiens in the animal kingdom, but it also could be used to demonstrate the superiority of Man over animals, or even, as in “social Darwinism,” the superiority of Western man over all other populations.

Relativism also had a specialized significance in ethnographic investigation: a necessary methodological attitude. For an accurate or objective report on the way of life of an alien culture, it was necessary to eliminate all prejudice based on one’s own ways and view the culture in a sympathetic but neutral manner. This neutrality, of course, could easily make its transition to affection: “my tribe” or “my culture” was heard in the corridors during meetings and conventions. And the technique also was carried into a general philosophy: all cultures were equal: equally good, equally valid—but paradoxically, “mine” was the best of all!

Value-neutrality (however quixotic) also fitted the dominantly secular spirit of the scientific and scholarly professions. Anthropology was one of the most aggressively secular of these fields because of its necessary methodological relativism and also because it was the heir of the nineteenth century victors in the battle of science versus religion, fought especially over the Darwinian concept of the descent of man. Anthropologists during the Classic era prided themselves on not being churchgoing creatures, and on their skepticism concerning all matters of supernatural belief—again, a useful attitude if one was to study all religions equally objectively. Of course, and again paradoxically, ethnologists could develop an emotional and even intellectual fascination with a “native religion” they had studied.

The Between-the-World-Wars was also an age of accelerated social and political change, but this was hardly represented in anthropology. If anything, anthropology was the one social study that seemed in its research to ignore the revolutionary developments triggered by world wars, revolution, and associated political upheavals. The French revolution and related national revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced the first prototypes of social science, and some of these, like the great communitarian experiments, the anti-slavery activities, and of course the writings of Karl Marx, brought early social science close to the revolutionary political temper of the period. Anthropology did eventually produce its “Applied” version in the middle Classic (chapter 12), but the field was professionalized and academic—as compared to some of the “defense of native races” advocacies of the nineteenth century.

Relativism and Idealization of the “Folk”

Several things converged in the early and middle Classic era: first, ethnologists fell in love—so to speak—with their data, or the sources of the data: the little tribal or peasant communities they studied intensively and whose cultures they endeavored to record and memorialize (see chapter 2, where I call them “stories”). Second, eventually the doctrine of cultural relativity was translated into a doctrine of humanitarian liberalism, featuring an ideology of tolerance and respect for all human groups—and especially the exotic, strange, even the terrifying. Third, ideas in the larger intellectual domain began to have their effects; in particular, the American idealization of the rural, the agrarian kingdom where people usually worked too hard to indulge in serious struggle, and where children were taught to be sober and upright human beings. Related was the theme that Robert Redfield abstracted from Ferdinand Tonnies and other social philosophers: the notion of the Gemeinschaft, or “folk society,” as Redfield (1940) translated it, giving it sociological-anthropological resonance. The concept listed a series of criteria in the left-hand column, emphasizing cultural homogeneity and interpersonal harmony and integrity, while in the right-hand column were the “urban” traits of disharmony, integrity, and so on (see chapter 4).

These attitudes added up to what can be called, following Robert Edgerton (1992), the “idealization of the folk.” Edgerton called the “folk society” version a “community-lost theory,” referring to the nostalgic idea that with the spread of urban industrializatism, the beauty and peacefulness of rural life was disappearing. That is, a kind of Golden Age notion to set against the secularized Progress theory of the urbanists. Thus, without fully realizing it, some anthropologists were lining up with a modern version of the Golden Age—or at least an anti-modern position, with the “folk” or at least tribal societies, representing a valuable and vanishing way of life. Aspects of this attitude persist into the 1990s, in the form of advocacy movements like Cultural Survival, which preach the need to preserve diversity and novelty in World Culture—just as the environmentalists seek to save the diversity of habitat and biome. Relativism had preached that humans—“cultures”—can do no wrong, and that exotic diversity is the salvation of human Culture.

One important consequence of this combination of relativism plus a special nostalgia for non-urban society and culture was an apparent neglect of what I have called the “dark side” (Bennett 1995) of human existence. This is a rather quixotic situation, since while ethnologists were in fact researching societies like Dobu (Fortune 1932) with their aggression, deceit, and cruelty, these phenomena tended to be played down, or at least blurred in a romantic fog based on the distance that ethnographic portraits of the exotic tended to have during the Classic era.¹ After all, the observed hate and violence was not ours, but someone else’s, and at a long distance, and also—and this was probably crucial—being performed by unsophisticated primitives who could not be expected to know any better. I doubt if any of these conventional rationalizations were conscious—but I believe they were there nonetheless. To a degree, at least, they were part of the worldview of Chicago graduate students in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time we were unable to admit that these rationalizations were really part of a fundamental moral ambiguity of anthropology’s posture vis-á-vis the dependent colonial peoples who constituted the major source of data for the discipline.

The Spirit of Classic Anthropology

Pick a year in the late 1940s, and let us attend the American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting. Total attendance is about 350 persons. It is either wartime or just after, and the total membership of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1. Classic Anthropology: An Introduction
• 2. Myth, Theory, and Value in Cultural Anthropology
• 3. Interdisciplinary Research and the Concept of Culture
• 4. The Micro-Macro Nexus in Classic and Post-Classic Anthropology
• 5. The Plains Indian Sun Dance: Leslie Spier’s Historical Reconstruction, and Functionalist Research by Others
• 6. Interpretations of Pueblo Indian Culture by Laura Thompson, Esther Goldfrank, Dorothy Eggan, and Others
• 7. Early and Late Functional Analysis: Bronislaw Malinowski’s Baloma: Spirits of the Dead and Clyde Kluckhohn’s Navaho Witchcraft
• 8. A Problem in Social Organization: The Use of Kinship as an Organizing Principle for Instrumental Activities
• 9. Psychology and Anthropology: Modes of Interface as Represented in the Work of F. C. Bartlett, Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, and Gregory Bateson
• 10. A. L. Kroeber and the Concept of Culture as Superorganic
• 11. Walter W. Taylor and Americanist Archaeology’s Search for a Concept of Culture
• 12. Applied and Action Anthropology: Problems of Ideology and Intervention
• 13. The “Famous Lady Anthropologists”: Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead
• 14. Populist Anthropology: Robert Lowie, Marvin Harris, and Clyde Kluckhohn
• 15. Epilogue: A Philosophical Voice at the End of the Classic Era: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• Some Afterwords
• Index of Names
• Index of Principal Topics