The History and Theory of Anthropology
Graduate Class
Lectures and Readings
Our department was led by a Berkley-trained medical anthropologist. He had been teaching this class when I joined. Either he asked or I volunteered to teach it, and it was my good fortune that he gave it to me. Over the years, it was an incredible learning experience, and in spite of the substantial time required to expand and prepare, I always felt grateful for the opportunity.
Anthropology studies people and culture. The word ‘theory’ usually implies the perspective and perhaps methods that the anthropologist brings to that study. In the one-hundred and fifty years that anthropology has existed, many different theoretical approaches have been applied to the study of people and culture. Those approaches are usually products of their time. In other words, they relate to the wider cultural context of anthropology, including especially the current scientific context, but also the political and popular social contexts within which science and academia reside. Each generation, it seems, attempts to re-invent anthropology anew. But in each case the past theories influence the form that the new anthropology takes. Therefore, we must study that history of theory in our discipline. We must understand what past anthropologists knew, in order to build upon it, or simply to avoid past mistakes. In this class, I introduce our students to that history of anthropology and its theory.
I had a good ‘theory’ textbook in English and Mandarin: Cultural Theory (2001, 2011) Philip Smith (BCh#). In addition, I assigned chapters from three well-known ‘readings’ textbooks. Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History (1996, 2008, 2017) R. Jon McGee & Richard L. Warms (M&W), High Points in Anthropology (1988) Paul Bohannan & Mark Glazer (B&G), and Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology (2006) Henrietta L. Moore & Todd Sanders (M&S).
Compared to my other graduate classes, I put a great deal of work into creating great ppts. That was partly because I used simpler versions for my undergrad class, Ideas in Anthropology, that I taught for a few years and then abandoned. It was a bit too much for the undergrads. I hope you will enjoy browsing the pdfs. Don’t miss my kinship tree of anthropologists and paradigms at the bottom of this page.
Introduction
This hopefully entertaining ppt was used for the Ideas in Anthropology undergrad class. It describes the scope of the class. But it also suggests how research is affected by theory, with the use of an exercise that I called, “What if you think… [the world works like this or that]” Then, what would you do? What would you study? What conclusions would you come to? Etc.
Foundations
This long ppt is split into two for my Human Adaptation and Cultural Evolution Class. Much of the impetus for it came from reading Why the West Rules - For Now, by Ian Morris
History and Theory of Cultural Anthropology
This long ppt was my original introduction ppt for the class. It was replaced by the History of Ideas ppt. But I will include it here, it is also quite good.
Nineteenth-Century Evolutionism (M&W:7-15)
The Evolution of Society (1864) Herbert Spencer (B&G:3-26)
Ethnical Periods (1877) Lewis Henry Morgan (M&W:43-54, also B&G:29-32)
Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook (1845) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (M&W:57-68)
Conjectural histories, Lamarck, Spencer’s organic analogy, early stage theories of cultural evolution (Morgan, Tylor, Marx), later stage theories (White, Steward, Service, Harris, Johnson & Earle), and racism and nationalism in cultural evolution.
Culture in Classical Social Theory (BCh.1), The Foundations of Sociological Thought (M&W:81-85)
What is a Social Fact (1895) Emile Durkheim (M&W:69-79)
Class, Status, Party (1922) Max Weber (M&W:103-115)
Foundations of Sociological Thought
Introducing the ‘continental’ social scientists Emile Durkheim from France and Max Weber from Germany. Durkheim’s big ideas were social solidarity, collective conscience, social facts, and mechanical and organic solidarity. Weber’s big ideas were the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism, disenchantment, rationalization, charisma, verstehen, methodological individualism, status, and bureaucracy. This ppt begins with a good dose of continental philosophy.
Structure and Function (Language, Biology, Kinship, and Ecology)
The Boasians (M&W:127-137)
The Methods of Ethnology (1920) Franz Boas (M&W:138-146)
Psychic unity from the ethnologist Bastian, and cultural relativism from the linguist de Saussure and the Prague School of structural linguists, and promoted by his students Sapir and Whorf. In my language development class, I argue that his approach remains relevant. His other most famous students were Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. I end with criticism of the label ‘historical particularists’. They can be better known as linguistic anthropologists. This ppt also begins with a dose of the German continental philosophy that underlies Boas thinking. Boas and students were the first true ethnographers, living for extended periods with many native American peoples and learning their languages.
Boas and students were a big influence on my thinking about language and culture as constructed products of learning. I was determined that someday, if I ever conducted my own fieldwork, I would go somewhere where I would need to conduct linguistic fieldwork and ‘discover’ the language grammar and culture as part of a larger study of human ecology. That is exactly what I did when I did dissertation fieldwork on the island of Bonaire, one of three Papiamentu speaking islands in the Dutch Antilles.
Functionalism (M&W:195-200)
The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis (1922) Bronislaw Malinowski (B&G:272-293)
Malinowski is known for the theoretical position of ‘functionalism.’ But I begin this ppt with the story of his famous fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders near the east coast of New Guinea. They practiced a kind of trading in prestige goods that became known as the Kula Ring. Malinowski’s functionalism focused on individual people with biological and psychological needs. Those needs are satisfied with culture.
The Reemergence of Evolutionary Thought (M&W:247-251)
The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology (1955) Julian Steward (B&G: 319-332) (Ppt, Patrilineal Band)
Energy and the Evolution of Culture (1943) Leslie White
Neoevolutionism and Cultural Ecology
The focus of this ppt are two Americans, Julien Steward and Leslie White. Scientific thought in America in the 1930-40s was dominated by three Es, ecology, evolution, and (nuclear) energy. White argued that, worldwide, Culture evolved as it captured and used more energy. Following Morgan, he created a version of ‘unilineal’ cultural evolution. Julian Steward was trained in zoology, and he believed that cultures adapted to local environments as do plants and animals. His version of cultural evolutionism was known as ‘multilineal’ evolution. The work of these two anthropologists, together with Malinowski, were big influences on my early thinking about culture as an adaptive tool for human groups.
Durkheimians
Durkheim Followers (BCh.5)
On Joking Relationships (1940) A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (M&W:179-189, also B&G:294-296)
Gifts and Return Gifts (1925) Marcel Mauss (B&G:264-270)
The Nuer (1955) E.E. Evans-Pritchard
Structural Functionalism and the Durkheimians
Mauss was Durkheim’s nephew. Mauss studied gift giving. He determined that gifts are not voluntary, but are part of a network of social obligations. They contribute to ‘social solidarity’, in Durkheim’s terminology.
While British, Radcliffe-Brown was influenced by the writings of Durkheim and Mauss. He studied kinship systems to determine how they contributed to stability or ‘social solidarity.’ He studied joking relationships between people and determined that they too created stability. His version of anthropology has become known as structural-functionalism.
Another British follower of Durkheim was Evans-Pritchard. His research among the Nuer of the Sudan demonstrated how their kinship system, known as segmentary lineages, functioned to maintain order among large societies of pastoralists who had no formal rulers.
French Structuralism
Structuralism and the Semiotic Analysis of Culture (BCh.6), Structure, Language, and Cognition (M&W:339-344)
Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology (1963:31-54) Claude Levi-Strauss In Structural Anthropology.
This long ppt is addressed to the expansive research and writing of Levi-Strauss. He was an erudite and deeply analytical thinker who strongly influenced continental anthropology for many years, either through supporters or those who challenged his ideas. For Levi-Strauss, all behaviors could be explained in terms of mind and language. He felt that anthropology should interpret conscious, variable events as the result of some unconscious fundamental reality, and he sought to uncover that reality in elaborate and, some would say, convoluted analyses of kinship, and of myth,
Neomaterialism and Systems
Neomaterialism (M&W:305-308)
A Theory of the Origin of the State (1970) Robert Carneiro
The !Kung San (1979) Richard Lee
Theoretical Principles of Cultural Materialism (1979) Marvin Harris (B&G:377-402)
Ritual Regulation of Environmental Relations (1967) Roy Rappaport
This ppt introduces the second generation of evolutionary ‘stage’ theorists. Those are Service, Sahlins, Carneiro, and Harris. The rest of the ppt is on Harris, who was at Florida during my graduate studies and served on my Masters and PhD committees. His seminars were fair, IMO, but with few naysayers among the grad students he had difficulty working up his fire. He loved to argue. During my undergrad years, the paperback versions of two of his most popular books appeared on my class reading lists. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches showed his penchant for solving the ‘riddles of culture’ with materialist functional explanations. Cannibals and Kings put him squarely among the new version of stage theorists of cultural evolution. Both books were irreverent and enjoyable to read, which captured the hearts and minds of many anthropology undergrads, me included.
The ppt goes into some detail about his general top-down theory of infrastructural determinism (infrastructure-structure-superstructure). It might surprise some people that his cultural materialism also included a bottom-up theory of decision making that began with his biopsychological needs and drives. It was an individual functionalism that built upon Malinowski’s approach. This part of his research strategy would inspire the HBEs (in the Evolutionary Anthropology ppt below) that would follow.
Interpretive and Symbolic Anthropology
Culture as Text: Narrative and Hermeneutics (BCh.11), Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology (M&W:435-438)
Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture (1973) Clifford Geertz (M&S,Ch.21, also B&G:529-530)
Symbols in Ndembu Ritual (1967) Victor Turner (M&W:493-510, also B&G:501-502)
I read Turner’s book A Forest of Symbols for an undergraduate class. It inspired me enough that I bought Van Gennep’s book Rites of Passage, not something I often did as an undergrad, buying extra books to read. Turner created a real feeling for the forest that I enjoyed.
When I returned to grad school, I was almost forbidden by my friends to read Geertz. Somewhere along the line I finally did, it did not corrupt me. When preparing for this class I read that there was a connection to Biblical hermeneutics. That brought me back to my undergrad days of taking religious studies and many histories. I came to more fully appreciate Geertz when I realized that he was recreating that method in his thick description of cock fighting in Bali.
For the ppt you will see that I had to insert a lot of ‘translation’ of Geertz’s writing. His literary style was really incomprehensible for the students (and myself before many re-readings). I do have reservations about that. I experienced some of the arrogance of his followers who believed that anthropologists need to be able to write like Geertz. His Agricultural Involution was a much better read for me, a good early ethnography without the pretension. I now see his approach to anthropology as one approach that does not require the exclusion of others, though he did not see it that way. It was a shame during the critique that anthropologists became so dogmatic and were expected to pick sides.
Western Marxism
Feminist Anthropology (M&W:405-407)
Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality (1983) Eleanor Leacock (M&S, Ch27)
Culture as Ideology in Western Marxism (BCh.3)
Introduction to Of Revelation and Revolution (1991) Comaroff and Comaroff (M&S,Ch.35)
When I went to grad school I was biased by reading Harris (1979) against what he called Structural Marxism. His cultural materialism was based on Marx’s fundamental model of base-superstructure. The newer ‘structural’ version that came from the continent was developing a number of concepts focused on ideology and were diluting of the causal model that Harris had elaborated in his infrastructural determinism.
I owe Oliver-Smith an apology for not being more open to his Marx class. Over the years I learned that continental terminology, and came to admire it: commodification, hegemony, culture industry, civil society, the public sphere, communicative reason, lifeworld, repressive state apparatus, ideological state apparatus, and others. It is all in the ppt for this class, which also includes concepts that I knew but did not immediately associate as Marxist: dependency theory, underdevelopment, world-systems theory, orientalism, postcolonial studies. A lot of big names of anthropology are in there (see the family tree below), many of which were leaders or inspiration for the postructuralists and postmodernists who mainly came after them.
Poststructuralism
The Poststructural Turn (BCh.7), Background to Postmodernism (M&W:491-495)
Two Lectures (1975) Michel Foucault (M&S,Ch.38)
I only read Foucault and Bourdieu when I was forced to, that is when I began to prepare for this class. Europeans will think that is very late, but they should recognize that scientific and materialist anthropology remained strong in America and especially at some universities like mine. I had a niche in environmental anthropology and evolutionary anthropology and did not see the need to face the enemy. I’m glad that I finally did. I see the attraction, especially for the young and rebellious European anthropologists who were challenging the conventions of the west that brought them colonial wars of independence in Vietnam, Algeria, Indonesia, India, etc., as well as the racism and sexism that surrounded them. Foucault today we would call edgy. He was a rock star, challenging conventions of religion, medicine, prisons, and sexuality. I do not see him as the challenge to science that many of his followers claimed. His targets were peripheral at best to hard science. But he did indeed shake things up, and for years you could not write a paper with at least several citations of Foucault or Bourdieu. They are still the two most cited authors in the history of sociology.
Culture, Structure, and Agency: Three Attempts at Synthesis (BCh.8), Agency and Structure (M&W:669-672)
Structures, Habitus, Practices (1980) Pierre Bourdieu
I have come to like Bourdieu. I take that back, I hate reading Bourdieu. For someone who protested the misuse of symbolic capital, his writing is pompous, turgid, pretentious, verbose, and a dozen other ten-dollar words of disapproval. But many of his ideas have made it into common language and academic sociology/anthropology. ‘Symbolic capital’ for one, ‘cultural capital’ is maybe number one on that list. Other terms like ‘fields’, ‘dispositions’, and of course ‘habitus’. Still, his language could be mind-numbing, i.e., ‘practice’, ‘doxa’, and others. They are all in the ppt, and each given sympathetic exploration. But I have to vent a little.
Unlike Foucault, Bourdieu was a scientific sociologist. His methodology of ‘correspondence analysis’ was used to great effect and has been copied by many others. The targets of his research, like Foucault, were also edgy. He attacked the common sense that justified inequality in French society in his most famous book, Distinction (1979). In class, I called him a self-help guru, because he gave people ideological tools to explain their failures in society, but I left that out of the ppt. The ppt ends with a review of the ‘critique’ of anthropology as I had been constructing it to that point. I will add one more chapter at the end of the next ppt on postmodernism.
Postmodernism
The Cultural Analysis of Postmodernism and Postmodernity (BCh.13, to p. 223), Postmodern and Poststructural Critical Theory (BCh.14), Postmodernism (M&W:527-531)
Stephen A. Tyler (1986) Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document, In Writing Culture
I once heard Marvin Harris growl in a session at the AAAs, ‘Deconstructionism is destructionism!’ He liked to try to turn a phrase. The ppt is centered on Rosaldo’s book, Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage (1989), with its many criticisms of the behavior of anthropologists in the field. It then provides a history of postmodernism in architecture, art, and literature, and followed by introductions of many of the more well-known social postmodernists: Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Turkle, Bauman, Harding, Seidman, Ashmore, Rorty, West, Calhoun, Butler, and Bhabha.
Today most scientific anthropologists do not dismiss the ‘critique’. Many social scientists demand that their research be ‘reflexive’. Some of the hard sciences over these same years have also rejected the reductionist and mechanical approaches of classical physics for ‘holistic’ studies of complex systems and self-organization. My impression is that the ‘critique’ has run its course. And yet, many departments remain staffed by European-trained poststructuralists and postmodernists. Here in Taiwan that is indeed the case, in which the many (scientific) archaeologists that I know feel little kindred with cultural anthropologists and vice versa, which is a great shame, IMO.
Evolutionary Anthropology
This short ppt introduces the New Cultural Evolution of the last 30 years. Human behavioral ecology (HBE), evolutionary psychology (EP), and duel inheritance (DI) have been coming closer to forming one approach centered on individual reproductive fitness as a shared theoretical framework. The ppt also mentions my brand of the ‘expanded synthesis’ that is energy self-organization. There is more to say about all of these in my undergrad class.
Anthropology Paradigms Family Tree
Below the border is my family tree or kinship diagram of academic paradigms in anthropology. Over the years, I made many versions of this. I learned this style of diagramming of anthropologists and their intellectual lineages from Robert Lawless. He taught the grad level theory class and was awful (he did not attempt a diagram like mine). But as a teacher of undergrads, he was phenomenal. His stories of fieldwork among the Kalinga of the Luzon were the best. But it was his preparedness and organization of lectures that put him heads above every other faculty at the time, IMO. If he was going to tackle an anthropologist or paradigm with a complex intellectual lineage, he would draw a smaller version of this type of diagram on the board. He’d come into class and go to the board and start drawing, without saying a word. It might take him 10 minutes. Then we would begin. As my knowledge of anthropology improved, I found these exercises to be extremely informative. I promised myself if I ever got the opportunity, I would do the same. In my class, I printed this diagram and gave it to grad students after about the 4th week of this class. They were very grateful, for by then they were starting to feel overwhelmed. We used the diagram to navigate the rest of the class. For this class, we had a reading for anyone with a (*) after their name. In my other two graduate classes, we read many of the other authors on this page. The blocking symbol (=) was intended to show authors who wrote against the ideas of their predecessors. If you cannot see the diagram properly, you can download it at the link.
