What is Anthropology?

Anthropology today is an academic discipline that strives to grasp the human condition in a comprehensive and holistic manner. To say that anthropology is comprehensive means that anthropologists are interested in all aspects of all humans wherever they might be found. Anthropology spans the globe, and anthropologists are interested in human biology as well as human culture. Anthropology takes a deep time perspective that seeks to describe and explain the evolution of humans from the earliest primates sixty million years ago to contemporary humans. Anthropology is holistic because anthropologists seek to synthesize multiple aspects of humanity. We are convinced that we must grasp human evolutionary biology to understand the creative arts, and that learning how humans tell stories is as essential as the study of brain neurons. Today,  anthropology is taught in most colleges and universities in the United States, Europe, and around the world. This course poses the question: How did anthropology and anthropologists emerge? How did the field come to take it’s current shape?

Why Study the History of Anthropology?

Not all academic disciplines take a deep interest in their history. Students of economics, for example, are unlikely to study the history of economic thought as part of their undergraduate or graduate curricula. And the relatively few economists who seriously study the history of their field often find a wider readership among anthropologists and other social scientists than their colleagues. Examples include Ronald Meek, who studied 18th century thinking about economic progress (Meek, 1976), and David Levy, who studies the relationship of economic thought to 19th century racial ideologies (Levy, 2001).

There are other disciplines where theory is primarily taught through the study of the history of the field. Compared to economics, mathematics occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s not just that many mathematicians take a deep interest in their intellectual forebears – who has not heard about Euclid or Newton or Euler? It goes much deeper. In effect, learning mathematics entails recapitulating the history of the field. Geometry and trigonometry are more than two thousand years old, algebra dates to the middle ages, calculus to the 17th century, and probability to the 18th century. As you “progress” to more advanced mathematical topics, you come closer to the current era.

On this spectrum, anthropology falls somewhere in the middle. Many anthropologists ignore the history of the discipline, and prefer, like economists, to work entirely with current theory. But others exert great effort to understand work from the past. The way many anthropologists approach the history of anthropology is in some ways similar to philosophers. Students of anthropology often read works by “great thinkers” in graduate school, and return to them for inspiration as their work matures.

But why?

The answer is not – or not only – that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it– as the philosopher George Santayana is said to have written.  If human experience is truly historical, then we must also allow – as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote – that we cannot step into the same river twice. But the virtues of historical understanding are, I think, more than proverbial.

The reason why we study history is that it helps us understand where we have come from, and how we arrived where we are today. It helps us understand how the present came to be. And by doing that, it helps us see alternatives that were not pursued. It widens our sense of future possibility. Indeed, just discovering that a contemporary idea has a history can be remarkably liberating. Learning the history of an idea can deepen our grasp of why that idea matters, and help us better understand how it both enables and limits our thinking.

To add personal perspective, I have had an interest in the history of anthropology since my junior year as an undergraduate, when I completed a course focused on the history of the field. I came out of that course convinced that knowing the past can help us understand how the present came to be, and that knowledge of the past can be a resource for us as we try to find our way forward. My own attraction to the history of the field probably has something to do with the difficulty I had in pulling anthropology together. I have found a historical perspective allows me to make sense of methods and perspectives that are mutually contradictory and incompatible. It provides perspective – and perhaps a little bit of wisdom – in evaluating recent and persistent divisions in the field. It also brings to the fore ethical issues, especially those involving relationships between anthropology as a profession and the communities anthropologists study.

Currently, research on the history of anthropology centers on two topics. First, the past and present relationships between anthropologists and the communities they study, and related issues surrounding (post) colonialism. The second topic concerns the relative homogeneity of anthropologists past and present, and limitations in how anthropologists have defined problems needing solved and acceptable resolutions. Studying the history of anthropology is a great way to reflect on your personal and professional ethical commitments, and develop your ability to discuss complex, difficult issues in a diplomatic and productive manner. This introduction to the history of anthropology is intended to help you to examine the deep historical roots of contemporary issues, including those involving equity, inclusion, and diversity.

The History of Anthropology (HOA) as a Scholarly Specialty

Today, the history of anthropology is a vibrant interdisciplinary specialty, enough so to travel under its own acronym: HOA. While it has no specialist journal, it does have a newsletter The History of Anthropology Review, and books on the topic are frequent. But although anthropologists have been reflecting on the history of their discipline for a century, the HOA as a scholarly specialty is fairly new.

It is convenient to date the HOA to 1920, when Franz Boas, the founder of American cultural anthropology, published an essay titled “The Methods of Ethnology” in the American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the field (Boas, 1920). Boas did name a few names, label some doctrines, and offer a historical perspective. But his primary point was that American cultural anthropology was something new, and that 19th century anthropology deserved to be forgotten. About two decades later, one of Boas’s students – Robert Lowie – published the first serious history of anthropology: The History of Ethnological Theory (Lowie, 1937). In many ways Lowie’s book rehearsed and expanded Boas’s essay (from 20 to 300 pages) and reached the same conclusion: the 20th century was the century of cultural anthropology.

Lowie’s book was a significant step forward, but it had several weaknesses as a comprehensive history of the field – most notably in its focus on ethnology alone, a weakness that persists even today (histories of biological anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology do exist, but they are not well integrated into the HOA). Lowie’s book was also rather narrow in scope. It is doubtful that Lowie’s book served as a teaching textbook outside of his own seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for several decades.

WHY TAKE AN INCLUSIVE APPROACH?

The title of this book refers to “histories of anthropology” in the plural. The use of the plural is meant to convey that there is more than one – and indeed a plurality – of  possible readings of the history of the field. Histories have to start somewhere, but the point of beginning is never given. We have to choose where to start. Scholarly choices reflect our vision of anthropology, and the lessons we deem to be important. The choices we make are always open to question. This doesn’t mean all possibilities are equally well supported, but it does imply that it is unlikely that there is one best narrative. In this introduction, I sketch some of the choices that have shaped what follows.

A reasonable argument can be made that courses in the history of anthropological theory emerged as a core disciplinary tradition around 1968. During the 1960s, anthropology – alongside the other social sciences – was struggling to define its identity. As the decade came to a close, anthropology was deeply divided. Linguistics, cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology were increasingly self-sufficient, separate enterprises. In departments across the United States, humanists and scientists were having a hard time getting along in a field which had long styled itself as the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences (Wolf, 1964).

When the history of anthropology emerged, the feminist movement,  the Black Power movement, the Red Power movement, and anti-colonial movements across the world were raising questions about the universality and neutrality of anthropological theories. Many younger anthropologists were questioning the purpose of the field. Perhaps these pressures made it impossible for anthropologists not to look to the past to gain perspective on possible futures. In 1968, two books were published that were opposed in perspective and scholarly tone, but together laid the foundations for HOA seminars over the next two decades. One was a collection of essays by an intellectual historian named George Stocking, Jr (Stocking, 1968). Stocking had taken an interest in anthropology, and late in the 1960s he joined the anthropology department at the University of Chicago, which at the time was seeking to revitalize the tradition of cultural anthropology founded by Franz Boas. The second volume was penned by an anthropologist named Marvin Harris (Harris, 1968). Harris was not a supporter of the Boasian tradition. His history was intended to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the chaff was anything that opposed a scientific, materialist account of human culture and behavior. Harris had recently ascended to chair the anthropology department at Columbia University. Columbia University, it bears noting, had for decades been the central institution for Franz Boas and his students.

Thus the HOA was born in a moment of conflict and division, and the first major works offered strikingly different visions of the past – and thus of the present and future of the discipline. Arguably, the HOA provides a scholarly ground for wide-reaching debates about what anthropology has been, is, and might become in the future. It is a dynamic, rapidly changing conversation. The debates between Stocking and Harris which struck such a nerve in 1968 were pushed to the edges of discussion within a few years, as new debates about gender, race, capitalism, war, and revolution came to the center.  And so it has continued. Prepare to be challenged and energized!

References Cited in the Introduction

Boas, Franz. 1920. The Methods of Ethnology. American Anthropologist 22(4): 311–321.

Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Crowell.

Levy, David M. 2001. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name. University of Michigan Press.

Lowie, Robert. 1937. History of Ethnological Theory. New York: Rinehart and Farrar.

Meek, Ronald L. 1976. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge University Press.

Stocking, George. 1968. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. The Free Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1964. Anthropology. Prentice Hall.