Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos “Tagungen” at the first “Histories of Anthropologies International Conference” (HOAIC) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Anthropology and Humanism, 2012
Some 45 years ago, I was presented with an examination question that asked me to discuss a dictum by the distinguished Victorian legal historian, F. W. Maitland: "My own belief is that by and by anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing." I had no real idea what the question meant, but, as anthropology and history are and were good things, I had no objection to anthropology's becoming history. However, I did not answer the question. Were I to do so now, I might ask what kind of anthropology and what kind of history are signified, as the answers to such questions depend on temporal, spatial, social, and personal factors, inter alia. Do we mean the old-fashioned high school history with lots of dates and battles, biographies that detail who had tea with whom, Whiggish history, strict historicism, Marxist history, or even Foucauldian genealogy? Do we mean evolutionary anthropology, structural-functionalism, historical particularism (which, after all, contains the word history)? What about French structuralism, political economy, or anthropological postmodernism? Most anthropologists reading Maitland's remarks today would not realize that for him (as for Boas in another country) the details of history were a necessary correction to premature, scientific attempts at comparative, evolutionary generalization. All of this means that one should have an idea what one is discussing when one talks about boundary crossing between academic disciplines and the blurring of genres, because the genres may be blurred to begin with. Accordingly, I approached this collection of chapters, based on a workshop at Cornell University, with a degree of skepticism, thinking that it would be another, tiring attempt to exhaust banal questions. I was favorably surprised in all possible ways. The editors, Willford and Tagliacozzo, claim that the volume's authors "use the interdisciplinary boundaries of history and anthropology to reveal the contingencies of knowledge production" (p. 1). Two of the chapters are primarily theoretical (Arnold and Cohen); the others examine ethnographic or historical issues in particular locales. Arnold's chapter and most of the remainder are to some degree concerned with the relationship between power and the generation of representations, narratives, and identities; and many are concerned with issues of "agency and subjectivity." bs_bs_banner 256 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 37, Number 2
2001
Series Preface vii Preface to the Second Edition viii Preface to the First Edition ix 1. Proto-Anthropology 1 Herodotus and other Greeks 1; After Antiquity 3; The European conquests and their impact 6; Why all this is not quite anthropology yet 10; The Enlightenment 11; Romanticism 15 2. Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman 20 Evolutionism and cultural history 21; Morgan 23; Marx 25; Bastian and the German tradition 27; Tylor and other Victorians 29; The Golden Bough and the Torres expedition 32; German diffusionism 35; The new sociology 38; Durkheim 39; Weber 41 3. Four Founding Fathers 46 The founding fathers and their projects 49; Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders 52; Radcliffe-Brown and the 'natural science of society' 55; Boas and historical particularism 58; Mauss and the total social prestation 61; Anthropology in 1930: parallels and divergences 64 4. Expansion and Institutionalisation 68 A marginal discipline? 69; Oxford and the LSE, Columbia and Chicago 72; The Dakar-Djibouti expedition 74; Culture and personality 77; Cultural history 80; Ethnolinguistics 82; The Chicago school 83; 'Kinshipology' 86; Functionalism's last stand 90; Some British outsiders 92 5. Forms of Change 96 Neo-evolutionism and cultural ecology 99; Formalism and substantivism 104; The Manchester school 107; Methodological individualists at Cambridge 112; Role analysis and system theory 117 6. The Power of Symbols 120 From function to meaning 121; Ethnoscience and symbolic anthropology 125; Geertz and Schneider 127; Lévi-Strauss and structuralism 130; Early impact 133; The state of the art in 1968 135 vi A History of AntHropology 7. Questioning Authority 138 The return of Marx 139; Structural Marxism 141; The not-quite-Marxists 145; Political economy and the capitalist world system 147; Feminism and the birth of reflexive fieldwork 151; Ethnicity 155; Practice theory 158; The sociobiology debate and Samoa 161 8. The End of Modernism? 166 The end of modernism? 171; The postcolonial world 176; A new departure or a return to Boas? 179; Other positions 184 9. Global Networks 192 Towards an international anthropology? 194; Trends for the future 200; Biology and culture 203; Globalisation and the production of locality 211 Bibliography 221 Index 239
In this context" : the many histories of anthropology
2004
My thanks to Wilson Trajano Filho for his suggestions that helped me clarify several cloudy ideas in the first draft, and to Antonádia Borges for the good conversations that moved me to further develop some of the themes discussed herein. George Stocking read the first draft and contributed with many comments, making this occasion a new experience of dialogue.
Imagining Anthropologyʼs History
Reviews in Anthropology, 2004
This is a review essay of two books with distinctive claims about the history of anthropology. One offers a basically sympathetic view of American anthropologists of the Left as they struggled with an oppressive capitalist state and world while the other volume is dedicated to the proposition that anthropology is inescapably the heir to the horrors of the colonial past--before there was a discipline of anthropology.
Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos 'Tagungen'
BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris., 2024
With reference to Paul Radin’s connection to the Eranos project, this article addresses what may be called a peculiar paradox: How can the place of this maverick anthropologist be obscured in disciplinary history while at the same time his core ideas and methods thrive in another milieu? I assert that this contradiction is the result of the complex way in which Paul Radin’s ideas and praxis interacted with anticanonical academic paradigms, aimed at attaining an integral understanding of what constitutes essential human nature. I reveal that Paul Radin regarded this anthropological pursuit as the primary aim of all investigations of culture. In his own program he advanced a triadic methodology to accomplish the analysis, an approach that definitely set him apart from his fellow Boasians. I argue that anthropologists adhering to a modern, secularized and particularistic methodological framework likewise reject the level of analysis which Paul Radin’s triadic approach entails. It is hardly a surprise then that there is a leaning in the history of anthropology towards obscuring a scholarly mission that is intertwined with apparently defeated paradigms, striving to achieve an integral perception of man’s basic existential condition.