Author meets critics: reactions to" Theory in anthropology since the sixties (original) (raw)
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
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.