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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 101

Jack David Eller

Routledge, forthcoming (February 2015)

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Table of Contents

Introduction—On Viral Ideas 3

Chapter 1 Diverse Humanity, Diverse Anthropology 6

Chapter 2 Studying Culture, Practicing Culture 20

Chapter 3 People and Things in Motion 34

Chapter 4 Producing and Reproducing Bodies 48

Chapter 5 Speaking and Thinking Culture 62

Chapter 6 Working for a Living 75

Chapter 7 Order and Border 89

Chapter 8 Humans and Other Persons 102

Chapter 9 We Are What We Do 116

Chapter 10 Better Living Through Anthropology 129

Bibliography 143

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INTRODUCTION—ON VIRAL IDEAS

The most influential book on my youth, and indirectly on my academic career, was Colin Wilson’s 1967
science fiction novel The Mind Parasites. Science fiction is an important modern genre for speculating
about alternative ways of life. That book introduced me to terminology like “parapsychology” and
“phenomenology,” which sent me on a quest to understand human nature and human differences which
led me to anthropology.

The premise of Wilson’s story is that disembodied beings based on the moon have been invading human
minds and guiding individual behavior and collective history for millennia. It probably often feels to us
that some outside force occupies our mind and drives our action, and it does: anthropologists call that
force “culture.” As the poet and novelist Oscar Wilde commented over a century ago, “Most people are
other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a
quotation.” His only mistake was limiting this assessment to most people; all of us are inevitably the
product of other people. The people before and around us literally occupy our minds.

It is common these days to talk about “viral” ideas or about a phrase, image, song, etc. “going viral.”
Culture is the original mind virus, the one that makes all other idea-transmission possible. Because of our
evolutionary history, our mental structure and brain anatomy, and our individual biography (each of us is
born immature and dependent), humans are unusually susceptible to the ideas and actions of other
humans. Trees do not imitate each other. Cats and dogs imitate each other a bit; some hunting animals
actually have to learn how to be a successful member of their own kind. Monkeys and apes can and do
learn even more from each other, but as anthropologists like Clifford Geertz contend, humans are
particularly “incomplete” at birth and are the most dependent on outside ideas to complete us.

In other words, humans have always been the kind of being characterized by the viral idea. Even more,
because humans organize themselves into structured groups—families, clans, villages, cities, nations—
they circulate their viruses within these social systems or “societies,” such that members of one society
share a set of ideas while members of other societies share other sets of ideas. Groups of humans further
put their ideas into actions, which settle into institutions and are objectified into “things.” Indeed, as we
will see, anthropologists increasingly appreciate the distribution and embodiment of people’s ideas into
the material objects that they make and then interact with. It is impossible to separate immaterial ideas
from the material world, and this includes the human body: our very bodies are sites of cultural meaning

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and action, whether this is tattooing or piercing or erecting elaborate social category-systems like race or
gender.

But viruses do not stay within the boundaries of specific populations, and viral ideas do not stay within
the boundaries of societies. Culture—in the form of words, skills, styles, artifacts, even entire languages
or religions—is transmitted not only between individuals but between societies, and with modern
communication and transportation it is possible and common for a viral idea to go global. That is why we
find sushi in the United States and hip hop in Japan. Just as epidemiologists study the vectors of disease
transmission within and between societies, Dan Sperber (1985) suggested that we could be
epidemiologists of what he called “representations,” investigating how cultural ideas and practices spread
and “stick.”

Cultural anthropologists are the social scientists who examine the cultural patterns and processes within
societies and the cultural similarities and differences between societies. For a long time, this meant (or
seemed to mean) studying “primitive” societies, a term that we reject today. Besides, it is not only small,
remote, “traditional” societies that have culture. All societies have culture; it is just that “we” tend to take
“our” culture for granted—as if it were natural and universal—and thus to see “their” culture as exotic
and different, as “cultural.” Cultural anthropologists try to avoid this exoticism, but we also want to make
our own familiar and taken-for-granted ways less familiar and less taken-for-granted. This project makes
our transmitted and inherited ideas suddenly unstable; things are not as easy or as certain as we thought.

Cultural anthropology is a fascinating and important discipline, but it is not and never has been purely
academic. Even in the 1800s, early anthropologist E. B. Tylor regarded the profession as a “policy
science,” and a century before, philosopher Immanuel Kant called anthropology “pragmatic.” Anyone
who contemplates a career in business or healthcare or education or social work will discover that
understanding cultural differences and possessing the skill to manage those differences—what many
fields call “cultural competence”—are critical to their success. Corporations like Xerox and Microsoft
have hired anthropologists to study their customers, their employees, and their competitors, and many
professions formulate and enforce their standards of cultural competence. Meanwhile, anthropologists
have been active contributors to advertising, design, and the medical and environmental professions (see
Chapter 10). There is no enterprise that cannot benefit from the anthropological perspective.

I like to tell my students that most of them will not become professional anthropologists but that all of
them will be amateur anthropologists, whether they know it or not. They will interact with people who

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have received different viral ideas than their own. They can become more aware of, and critical about, the
viral ideas that flow their way, and they may even invent new viral ideas. This short book will aid you to
learn how cultural anthropologists think and what we have discovered, as well as to ponder how cultural
anthropology can be useful in your own personal and professional interactions.

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CHAPTER ONE DIVERSE HUMANITY, DIVERSE ANTHROPOLOGY

“Are they human?” wondered the European conquerors, explorers, and missionaries when they first
encountered the indigenous peoples of America. Certainly Europeans had never seen human beings so
different from themselves, and the existence of Native Americans challenged European thinking in many
ways. The American continent was not even known in their geography and theology, and the accepted
doctrine of monogenism (that all humans originated from a single ancestor, namely, Adam and Eve)
could not easily explain the location, appearance, and behavior of these strange people. In 1537 the
Catholic Church happily declared them rational beings. Still, a formal debate was held within the Church
in 1550 at the Council of Vallodolid, in which Juan Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were an inferior
inhuman kind, barbarians and pagans by nature, ruled by passion rather than reason, and fit only for
slavery. Bartolomé de las Casas responded that they were pagans but fully human, with a rational soul,
and therefore that Europeans should be humane to them, help them, and persuade them of Christian truth.

No human group has ever been so isolated that it did not have contact with other different humans—
different in body, different in language, different in behavior, in dress and food and religion and so on.
But humans have also typically been essentially disinterested in these others and even denied their basic
humanity; much more recently, Elizabeth Ewart (2103) described the Panará of Central Brazil, who
consider themselves to be human and everyone else to be hipe, a term that includes not only foreign and
enemy humans but also other noxious beings such as wasps, game animals, and witches.

People with such attitudes toward other humans are unlikely to be curious, let alone to make much effort
to learn about them. Neither the Panará nor the colonial Spanish did anything like anthropology.
However, anthropology finds human diversity interesting, thrilling, and important. It begins with the
acknowledgement that all humans are human and makes the further claim that in order to know humanity
we must know “the other” too, that is, that we must precisely know humanity is all its extraordinary
diversity. In extending the concept of “humanity” to others unlike, and sometimes distasteful to,
ourselves, anthropology is, in the words of the classic anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, “the most
humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities” (quoted in Wolf 1964: 88).

THE NATURAL SCIENCE OF MAN?

Anthropology is a relatively new—perhaps the newest—major academic discipline, although the idea and
the term has a longer history. By 1910 anthropology had enough stature to merit a history of the subject

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by Alfred Haddon, an early enthusiast who was actually trained as a zoologist. He claimed that the Latin
word Anthropologium (from the Greek anthropos for “man/human” and logos for “study”) was used in
1501, mainly to refer to the study of the human body, and that “anthropology” appeared in English in a
1655 treatise on human nature and anatomy.

But anthropology really began to emerge in the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the era of colonialism
and early-modern science, and therefore it was shaped by colonial and scientific interests, as the scientific
study of mankind. In his 1863 Introduction to Anthropology, Theodore Waitz asserted that the field
“aspires to be the science of man in general; or, in precise terms, the science of the nature of man” (1863:
3), which should “study man by the same method which is applied to the investigation of all other natural
objects” (5).

Not surprisingly, this approach made anthropology largely the province of the biologist and the anatomist,
like Haddon or like Armand de Quatrefages, a nineteenth-century lecturer, who contended that
anthropology should study mankind “as a zoologist studying an animal would understand it” (quoted in
Topinard 1890: 2). The point here is that, while the present book is about cultural anthropology, it is
necessary to understand that “culture” was not the first preoccupation of anthropology, which was
originally focused on human bodies and which maintains this dual interest to today.

The question of human bodily diversity was based on what Haddon called, quoting an unknown Professor
Giddings, a “consciousness of kind” (1910: 7) and which took the inevitable form of race. Speculation
about and classification of race already had a long history, from Linnaeus’ influential four-race system in
his 1737 Systema Naturae to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s five-race system described in 1779. This
line of inquiry was so firmly established that in 1876 Paul Topinard called anthropology “the branch of
natural history which treats of man and the races of man” (1890: 3).

At the same time, Topinard acknowledged that anthropology was one of two distinct perspectives,
virtually “two distinct sciences,” the second being “ethnology.” Anthropology, as noted, “occupies itself
with Man and the races of mankind,” while ethnology (from the Greek ethnos for “a people”) “only
concerns itself with such peoples and tribes as geography and history hand over to us” and investigates
not only the physical traits of each group but also “its manners, customs, religion, language, physical
characteristics, and origin” (8-9).

THE HISTORY OF INSTITUTIONS

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In parallel with this new biological perspective on mankind (Western tradition long being profoundly
uninterested in the human body) but from a much older date, scholars pondered the origin and history of
social institutions like government or marriage. The key insight behind this effort was that different
societies had quite different institutions and, even more imperatively, European society had not always
had the institutions that it currently possessed, no matter how real and right those forms felt. The ancient
Greeks had compared the constitutions and political systems of neighboring cities, and the Romans
documented social differences between themselves and the peoples they encountered and conquered
while writing down their own social history (for instance, from republic to empire).

Interest in the history of institutions revived in the early modern era in the political philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes (as in his 1651 Leviathan) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (as in his 1762 Of the Social Contract).
Both men opined that “society,” by which they roughly meant government and civil institutions,
originally did not exist; in the beginning, people lived in a “state of nature” (which Hobbes imagined as
selfish and violent and Rousseau idealized as peaceful and free).

By the mid-1800s, particularly with the advent of evolutionary thinking, researchers argued that societies
and governments had developed and changed from “primitive” to ancient to medieval to modern times.
Naturally, much of the attention was concentrated on the institutions of the Greeks and Romans, the
ancient Hebrews, and other major civilizations, especially their laws. In 1861, for instance, Henry Sumner
Maine published Ancient Law, which he followed in 1875 with Early History of Institutions and in 1883
with On Early Law and Custom.

Meanwhile, thinkers were discovering that the family was not a natural and universal institution but also
had a social history. One of the most important of these men was Johann Jakob Bachofen, who reckoned
that marriage and family had evolved through a series of stages from promiscuity or polyamory (no
marriage or family) to patriarchy and monogamy by way of matriarchy. His influential 1861 book was
thus titled Das Mutterrecht, translated as “mother right.” Shortly thereafter, John Ferguson McLennan
wrote the 1865 Primitive Marriage, subtitled “An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in
Marriage Ceremonies,” and a few years later, in 1871, Lewis Henry Morgan published Systems of
Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, which is widely regarded as a founding document for
the anthropology of kinship. However, by far his most influential work was the 1877 Ancient Society,
where he combined the study of the Iroquois with chapters on the Aztecs, the Greeks, and the Romans.
More importantly, he proposed a scheme of seven stages of social evolution, bundled into three major

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periods—“savagery,” “barbarism,” and “civilization.” Reasoning that “mankind commenced their career
at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow
accumulations of experimental knowledge” (1877: 3), so-called savage or primitive societies became
relevant to our own social history. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took note of Morgan’s work, and
Engels explicitly acknowledged it in his history of marriage and family.

Box 1.1 Morgan’s Seven Stages of Society

Lewis Henry Morgan categorized the path of social history through a set of phases based on
economic/technological criteria. These stages included:
Lower Savagery: “From the infancy of the Human Race to the commencement of the next period”
Middle Savagery: “From the acquisition of a fish subsistence and a knowledge of the use of fire”
Upper Savagery: “From the invention of the bow and arrow”
Lower Barbarism: “From the invention of the art of pottery”
Middle Barbarism: “From the domestication of animals on the Eastern hemisphere, and in the Western
from the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation, with the use of adobe-brick and stone”
Upper Barbarism: “From the invention of the process of smelting iron ore, with the use of iron tools”
Civilization: “From the invention of a phonetic alphabet, with the use of writing, to the present time”
(1877: 12-3).

Religion was one of the last and most controversial subjects for historical analysis and comparison,
because treating Christianity as a historical object and comparing it to other religions verged on
blasphemy. In fact, the idea of religions in the plural was not a familiar or welcome notion; there was one
true religion, and it was (contemporary European) Christianity. William Robertson Smith wrote Religion
of the Semites: Fundamental Institutions in 1889 (as well as a study of Kinship and Marriage in Early
Arabia in 1885), after losing his teaching position at the Aberdeen Free Church College in 1881 over
charges of heresy. Even more epoch-making was James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first
published in 1890 but expanded subsequently into many volumes, which traced and compared—and
discovered great consistency between—beliefs and myths from “primitive” to ancient to
modern/Christian religions. Most influential on the future of cultural anthropology was The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life, published by Émile Durkheim in 1912. A founder of modern sociology and a
contemporary of founders of modern anthropology like Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski,
Durkheim’s study drew on current field descriptions of Australian Aboriginal religion to suggest a social
basis for the phenomenon of religion.

FROM ANTHROPOLOGY TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

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From its earliest days, anthropology had this split personality, encompassing both human bodies and
human behavior and institutions, with bodies being more fundamental than behavior (and often explaining
behavioral differences in terms of bodily differences). Accordingly, nineteenth-century books on
anthropology tended to include sections on both subjects, with physical topics first and behavioral topics
second: Part I of Waitz’s book was called “Physical Investigation,” of Topinard’s book was called “On
Man Considered in His Ensemble, and in His Relations with Animals,” and of Haddon’s book was titled
“Physical Anthropology.” However, the second section of Haddon’s work was titled “Cultural
Anthropology” and embraced such chapter topics as ethnology, archaeology, technology, religion,
language, and the influence of the environment.

Even as culture slowly separated as a concept (see Chapter 2), bodily and racial questions continued to be
dominant. Indeed, the late nineteenth century was the era of “scientific racism,” with practitioners of
anthropometry devising clever ways to measure human bodies, often if not essentially in order to
scientifically justify racial—and racist—conceptions. Scientists measured the length of arms, the angle of
faces, and most meaningfully the volume of brains, typically on the assumption that long arms, protruding
faces, and small brains were markers of “primitive” and therefore inferior breeds. The most adamant of
the scientific racists advocated racial segregation and even eugenics, the organized effort to “improve”
humanity through controlled breeding (to breed out the inferior traits and types).

Another egregious manifestation of the physical obsession of nineteenth-century anthropology, mixed

with the colonial gaze of triumphant Western countries, was the exhibition and display of peoples from
conquered and colonized parts of the world. In circuses, traveling shows, and world fairs like the Great
Exhibition of 1851 in London, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and the Colonial
Exhibition of 1931 in Paris, Australian, Asian, Native American, and African people were shown in what
can only be called human zoos; often entire families were put on display, sometimes with props like huts
and tools to become a living tableaux for Western audiences. But, as Sadiah Qureshi tells, these were not
only occasions for city folk to gawk at exotic people; these were also considered “educational
opportunities for budding ethnologists” (2011: 187). Leading scientists in fields from anthropology to
zoology attended such events, where the natives were sometimes caged and naked, recognizing that the
humans on show were “usable experimental material,” and “the opportunities they provided for research
were…taken up with enthusiasm” (221).

A key element of the rise of cultural anthropology was a pointed critique of the race concept, particularly
as an explanation of behavioral diversity. One of the first and loudest critics was Franz Boas, who is

10
widely regarded as the father of modern cultural anthropology. In a series of writings from 1911 to 1945
he countered race as an academic concept, arguing first that there was little clear meaning in the term
(recall that Linnaeus and Blumenbach disagreed on how many races there were) and that physical traits
could not be linked significantly to behavior. Quite to the contrary, he conducted research that suggested
that “racial” traits were not fixed and permanent but that bodily characteristics were actually a product of
cultural experience, not vice versa.

Box 1.2 Franz Boas Tests Racial Explanations of Behavior

Boas attacked race as a cause of human behavioral differences, claiming that there was no such thing as a
pure race and that supposedly racial features were not permanent or stable. He conducted anthropometric
measurements on thousands of immigrants to the United States from several European nationalities,
believing that their new social environment would “affect the form of the body during the period of
growth” (1911: 100). He concluded that “every single measurement that has been studied has one value
among individuals born in Europe, another one among individuals of the same families born in America”
(101). In fact, he found the effects of the new environment to be dramatic and abrupt; in other words,
there was not set of fixed “racial types” but rather “a decided plasticity of human types,” and “if the
bodily form undergoes far-reaching changes under a new environment, concomitant changes of the mind
may be expected” (102). In short, “The old idea of absolute stability of human types must…evidently be
given up, and with it the belief of the hereditary superiority of certain types over others” (103).

Boas and scholars like him—many of them trained by Boas at Columbia University in the first half of the
twentieth century—helped establish cultural anthropology as a distinct field, with its own university
departments, its own academic journals, its own research literature, its own professional associations, and
all the trappings of an independent discipline.

Crucial to the integrity of cultural anthropology as a coherent discipline is its unique way of looking at the
human world, which is commonly dubbed the anthropological perspective. All sciences of humanity or
social sciences ultimately share the same data source, which is humans acting. But as thinkers from
Aristotle to Marx to early anthropologists have agreed, in the words of Waitz, “Whosoever would arrive
at a just conception of Man must not consider him exclusively as an individual, for man is…a social
being; as an individual being he cannot be fully understood” (1863: 10-1). Therefore, cultural
anthropology concentrates on humans in groups and as members of groups, not of course denying humans
their individuality. We understand too that much of our individuality is a product of our social experience,
that we are all, as commented in the introduction, constructions of our experience of other people; as

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Waitz likewise realized, “the social life into which he enters, contributes much towards teaching the
individual what passes within him, as in a mirror” (11). Thus, while cultural anthropology never
dismisses the notion of “mind” and indeed has a long and intimate kinship with psychology, cultural
anthropology is more interested in what is outside of and between individuals than what is inside them—
because most of what is inside comes from outside.

This attitude leads to three specific elements of the anthropological perspective:

1. Cross-cultural or comparative study. Cultural anthropologists want to know humanity in its full
behavioral and cultural diversity. Originally, this tended to mean focusing on those societies that
are most different from modern Western ones, that is, the small, remote, “traditional” and “tribal”
societies dispersed around the world. Indeed, as lately as 1952 the eminent British anthropologist
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown defined cultural anthropology as “the study of what are called primitive or
backward people” (1952: 2), but that opinion is both judgmental and inaccurate, as cultural
anthropology has as much responsibility—and as much ability—to enlighten us on modern
complex societies as pre-modern ones.
2. Holism. Cultural anthropology aims to know each particular culture or way of life in its entirety.
Following from the seminal work of Boas and Malinowski, cultural anthropologists realize that
each culture is an integrated whole—not static by any means and not always completely
internally consistent, but consisting of deeply interconnected parts. As an illustration, imagine
that a being from another planet came to earth and discovered this phenomenon called “marriage”
which does not exist on its homeworld. In order to understand, say, American marriage beliefs
and practices, the sojourner would have to learn about and understand religion, family, gender
roles, sexuality, politics, economics, and virtually every other aspect of American culture.
3. Cultural relativism. Cultural anthropologists also appreciate that each culture can only be
understood on its own terms, “relative to” its own beliefs, values, practices, institutions, and
history. People certainly can judge and (try to) understand another culture through the lens of
their own, but they will almost certainly fail to understand and they will probably judge harshly.
Cultural anthropologists use the term ethnocentrism for this quite natural tendency of humans to
apply their own group’s standards to other groups, but it is a particularly undesirable attitude. The
first step in appreciating difference is accepting that things really are different and then trying to
understand objectively—“from the native’s point of view,” as Malinowski famously put it—what
other people think they are doing. Cultural relativism does not mean that we have to like or adopt
what other societies do, but it does mean that we must set aside our (learned) reactions to those
societies and perceive them without prejudice.

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DIVERSITY WITHIN ANTHROPOLOGY

The Four Fields

Despite its distinctness from, and the fact that it had to wrestle itself free from, nineteenth-century body-
focused anthropology, cultural anthropology is still considered a subdiscipline of the wider category of
anthropology. It is one of the four fields typically included within anthropology, broadly conceived as the
study of human diversity. Therefore, anthropology is often thought of, and sometimes taught as, a “four-
field” discipline, of which cultural anthropology is one—although probably the largest and most
dominant—division.

According to the American Anthropological Association (www.aaanet.org/about/

whatisanthropology.cfm), the premier professional organization in the United States, the four fields of
anthropology are:
 cultural (or social) anthropology, which studies “social patterns and practices across cultures,
with a special interest in how people live in particular places and how they organize, govern, and
create meaning”
 physical (or biological) anthropology, studying “how humans adapt to diverse environments, how
biological and cultural processes work together to shape growth, development and behavior, and
what causes disease and early death. In addition, they are interested in human biological origins,
evolution, and variation”
 archaeology, the study of “past peoples and cultures, from the deepest prehistory to the recent
past, through the analysis of material remains, ranging from artifacts and evidence of past
environments to architecture and landscapes”
 linguistic anthropology, or “the comparative study of ways in which language reflects and
influences social life.”
We might think of cultural and linguistic anthropology as the “behavioral” anthropologies, whereas
physical anthropology and archaeology are the “material” anthropologies. This mnemonic helps a little,
since physical anthropology and archaeology tend to investigate material remains like bones and artifacts,
while cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology observe living people in action. All the same, the
distinction between behavior and material objects is not absolute, as cultural and linguistic
anthropologists are interested too in the things that humans make and in how culture and language shapes

13
their very bodies, and physical anthropologists and archaeologists ultimately want to know how humans
and pre-humans lived and behaved in the past.

Each of the four fields has its own institutional basis, with its own academic departments, organizations
and meetings, literature and research agendas, and influential ancestors. Sometimes the four fields operate
in relative indifference to each other: for instance, in my graduate program archaeology was in a
completely different building, and we cultural anthropologists did not interact with them much at all.
However, there are also valuable points of contact between the sub-professions, and recently more
practitioners have been reading each other’s literature and collaborating in various productive ways. I
must admit that, at times, it seems like physical anthropologists and archaeologists know more about
cultural anthropology and linguistics than vice versa.

Cultural Anthropology versus Social Anthropology?

Cultural anthropology became the name by which the discipline was known and practiced, primarily in
the United States. Meanwhile, a different—and rival—strain of anthropology emerged, based in England,
which called itself social anthropology. A bit over-simplistically, American cultural anthropology was
associated with the work and teaching of Boas in New York, while British social anthropology formed
around Malinowski in London. The central concept of cultural anthropology was, obviously, culture,
which is the subject of the next chapter. Cultural anthropology also, at least in the eyes of social
anthropologists across the Atlantic, concentrated on the description of particular cultures—on
“ethnology”—and also on the minds of individuals (see the “culture and personality” school below) and
the beliefs and values and knowledge that these individual minds were purported to hold.

While Malinowski is often hailed as the father of social anthropology, his writings were actually more
cultural than the social anthropologists came after him. The real source of social anthropology was A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski’s successor, who argued in a 1940 essay that we cannot see “culture,” only
actual human behavior: “We do not observe a ‘culture,’ since that word denotes, not any concrete reality,
but an abstraction, and as it is commonly used a vague abstraction” (1952: 190). Elsewhere he even more
strenuously rejected cultural anthropology, insisting: “You cannot have a science of culture. You can
study culture only as a characteristic of a social system…. If you study culture, you are always studying
the acts of behavior of a specific set of persons who are linked in a social structure” (1957: 106).

14
As those words indicate, Radcliffe-Brown and the subsequent school of social anthropology thought that
“social structure” was the proper subject of anthropology, rather than culture. In this orientation, he and it
were openly indebted to Durkheim and sociology. Accordingly, Radcliffe-Brown declared that “I
conceive of social anthropology as the theoretical natural science of human society, that is, the
investigation of social phenomena by methods essentially similar to those used in the physical and
biological sciences. I am quite willing to call the subject ‘comparative sociology,’ if anyone so pleases”
(1952: 189). Social structures, he asserted, “are just as real as are individual organisms” (190), and
therefore anthropology could and should not only describe and analyze but compare and classify them
and ultimately derive “social laws,” which is the proper business of science.

Adam Kuper, in his history of British social anthropology, noted that the discipline only began to
coalesce after the 1920s, and particularly by 1940, and that is consisted of a remarkably small number of
practitioners, including E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes. Under their leadership, the geographical
focus of British anthropology shifted to Africa (the main site of British colonial territories), “with its
large, sprawling, and often highly differentiated societies” (1983: 97) instead of the small, allegedly
pristine societies of previous anthropology. As well, “there was a change in topical interest from the
family, magic and making a living, to political and kinship systems” (97).

The differences between social and cultural anthropology, insofar as they persist, are not terribly
significant. They are more a matter of emphasis than of incompatibility. Cultural anthropology has of
course expanded into areas of politics and kinship and has wrestled with the problem of structure (and its
flip-side, change) while struggling with the vagaries of “culture.” Social anthropology has also examined
religion and economics—indeed, Evans-Pritchard wrote a hugely important study of the religion of the
Nuer people of East Africa—and has learned to speak the language of culture. The real point here is that
anthropology never was a single unified discipline or way of thought but was divided from its first days
into local and national anthropological traditions, and it has only continued to grow and differentiate into
the present into multiple anthropologies or “world anthropologies” (see below).

The Theoretical Schools of Cultural Anthropology and the Crisis in Anthropology

Cultural anthropology is hardly a static field, slavishly reproducing the theories and practices of its
founding ancestors. Over its approximately one-hundred-year history, cultural anthropology has offered
many different theoretical perspectives and passed through a sort of professional crisis that has left the
field changed (for the better, most members believe).

15
Many of the theoretical schools of cultural anthropology have come and gone, products of a specific era
that made their contribution and then faded. Others are ongoing competitors within the field, often
generating heated arguments between partisans over issues such as the origin and universality of violence.
Among the most noteworthy cultural anthropological schools of thought have been:
 Culture and personality. From the 1920s, American cultural anthropology in particular was
fascinated with the question of the relationship between shared culture and individual personality.
Influenced by the developmental theories of Sigmund Freud, anthropologists like Margaret Mead,
Ruth Benedict, Cora DuBois, Ralph Linton, and A. Irving Hallowell analyzed how culture shaped
individual mind and personality, usually focusing on childhood experiences and sometimes
employing psychological devices like personality tests and Rorschach inkblots. In probably the
most famous of all anthropological publications, Benedict’s 1934 Patterns of Culture, each
culture was conceived as producing a characteristic configuration of personality traits, which
constituted the “norm” of the society and simultaneously defined abnormality.
 Neo-evolutionism. Associated with Leslie White and Julian Steward, neo-evolutionism re-
introduced a more sophisticated version of cultural evolution such as the notion of “multilinear”
evolution which envisioned more than one possible evolutionary path that a culture could take.
 Structuralism. Claude Lévi-Strauss took language as an analogy for culture: language has “bits”
or elements (sounds, words, and so on) in structured relationships with each other (that is,
“grammar”), and the grammatical relations between linguistic elements determine their meaning
more than the individual elements themselves. Thus he looked beneath the surface of culture to
identify the generative rules or grammar of culture, which he posited were inherent in the human
mind.
 Ethnoscience. Also known as cognitive anthropology or componential analysis, ethnoscience
sought to examine and expose the mental classification systems that shaped local people’s
experiences and actions. As formulated by Ward Goodenough, Charles Frake, and Stephen Tyler
among others, ethnoscience aimed to expose the mental models of reality that humans have in
their heads (usually implicitly) that organize their world in specific ways. Thus, the scientific
anthropologist would reconstruct the “folk taxonomy” or the “knowledge structure” of a society,
which was the skeleton and structure of its entire meaning and action system.
 Symbolic/interpretive anthropology. Influenced heavily by the philosophies of Suzanne Langer
and Ernst Cassirer who saw all human thought and action as mediated by symbols, the meanings
of which could not always be described rationally, anthropologists like Victor Turner, Clifford
Geertz, and Sherry Ortner envisioned culture as a great symbol system that creates meanings

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 which guide human behavior. Geertz insisted that culture needed to be “interpreted” or “read”
like a text, while Turner applied a more actor-centered or theatrical model to culture, in which
ritual as a “social drama” played a central role.
 Marxist/critical anthropology. In the second half of the twentieth century especially, Marxist or
“critical” theory exerted a strong pull on cultural anthropology. In the works of Maurice Bloch,
Maurice Godelier, and many others, there was a new concern for issues of economics, class,
power, and domination. This perspective emphasized and actively looked for competitive or
conflictual relations in society in a way that early anthropology did not and perhaps could not,
with its perspective of integration and homogeneity. While it claimed to be scientific and
practical, it also tended to be abstract and “theoretical” (even inventing a new word for practice—
“praxis”) and often openly partisan and critical of existing values and institutions.
 Cultural materialism. Championed especially by Marvin Harris in popular writings like his 1975
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches as well as in more technical work, this theory extended the
ecological views of White and Steward as well as the Marxist view, basing cultural behaviors
firmly on “the practical problems of earthly existence” posed by the encounter between “womb
and belly” (Harris 2001: xv) on one hand and the material world of food, climate, and
competition for territory or offspring on the other. Like ethnoscience it aimed at a more scientific
anthropology, exposing the practical material “causes” of human action.
 Feminist anthropology. A feminist approach to anthropology appeared in the 1970s as a reaction
to male-centered perceptions of the field and its literature (“man the hunter” type approaches and
so on). Happily, from early in its history women have played a prominent role in cultural
anthropology (as evidenced by Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Cora DuBois, to name a few),
but a literature on women and their activities across cultures had been lacking, partly because
many cultures have sex-segregated knowledge which male anthropologists could not access.
Michelle Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, and Rayna Reiter were among the founders of the
movement to explore gender relationships, gender inequalities, and the participation of women in
cultures where that participation had been overlooked or minimized. Feminist anthropology does
not focus exclusively on women but rather on gender diversity and gender issues broadly
conceived.

Around 1970, cultural anthropology experienced something of an identity crisis, questioning not only its
concepts and practices but its very right to exist. The simple, isolated, pristine cultures of early
anthropology no longer existed, if they ever did. Worse, the discipline endured scathing criticism for its
complicity in colonialism, as least some of the criticism deserved. Worst of all, it came to doubt its own

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central terms and concepts, including “culture” and “society.” Back in 1954, Edmund Leach’s Political
Systems of Highland Burma had challenged the notion that there are clear, bounded “societies” out there
to study. By 1972 Dell Hymes was calling for Reinventing Anthropology, and anthropologists continued
to turn their gaze upon themselves, Roy Wagner in 1975 recognizing The Invention of Culture and Adam
Kuper in 1988 stressing The Invention of Primitive Society, whose book was subtitled “Transformations
of an Illusion.” Anthropologists also discovered that anthropology is, like every other intellectual
enterprise, a form of knowledge-creation and a form of literature, as revealed in James Clifford and
George Marcus’ 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Cultural anthropology
has become more self-reflexive, which has been mostly beneficial.

World Anthropologies

Anthropology exists because humanity is diverse and plural; there is not one kind of human or one human
way of life but many. Anthropology itself has likewise always been diverse and plural, from the twin
anthropologies of body and behavior to the four fields of anthropology to the rival cousins of cultural and
social anthropology. But for the most part, these various anthropologies have been Western (European
and American), with Western practitioners and Western questions, written in Western languages.

Westerners have never been the only practitioners of cultural anthropology, but for the most part non-
Westerners were trained by Western anthropologists into Western anthropology. There are, interestingly
and importantly, growing exceptions to this European and American domination of the discipline, with
multiple national anthropological traditions emerging around the world. China, for example, has a
thriving anthropology and social science industry, based explicitly on the premise of Zhongguohua or
“Sinicization” of the field or “the necessity of bringing the social realities and problems of Chinese
society into social science work” (Dirlik 2012: 27); Latin American countries along with India, Iran,
Japan, and others have taken to practicing and reinventing anthropology their own way. Two advocates of
these developments, Gustavo Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, contend that with the emergence of these
diverse traditions “the idea of a single or general anthropology is called into question” (2006: 1), which
had led to the notion of world anthropologies. Indeed, the plurality of anthropologies has advanced to the
point where there are organizations like the World Council of Anthropological Associations, the World
Anthropologies Network, and the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. The
most salutary effect of the proliferation of anthropologies has been what Indian historian Dipesh
Chakrabarty (2007) called “provincializing Europe”—that is, not hating the West or denying the

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 knowledge that the West generates but putting the West back in its place as one of many centers of
knowledge and ways of knowing. Anthropology can only applaud this development.

Box 1.3 African Anthropology Studies American Anthropology

We mentioned the colonial gaze above, by which mostly white male Westerners stared at and studied
mostly non-white non-Westerners in the name of “science” (but also of political control). Lately, though,
non-Westerners have returned the gaze, describing how they see us and forcing us to see ourselves
differently. Mwenda Ntarangwi is a Kenyan anthropologist who did a little anthropology of anthropology
when he came to the United States. His book, aptly titled Reversed Gaze, offers an African perspective on
American anthropological training and professional anthropological organizations. He finds American
graduate students surprisingly passive and also averse to the issue of race. He chastises us for the
superficiality of much of our reading and discussion, for the obsession of teachers with theory and of
students with extra credit, and of the practice of “recycling field notes,” that is, using data collected years
or decades ago to produce allegedly new and relevant publications. At a conference of American
professionals, he skewers us for the performances we put on in front of each other, for the celebrity status
of a few big-name anthropologists, for the desperate scramble for jobs at interview booths, and for the
unbearable whiteness of American anthropological being. Finally, he returns to Africa to describe
“anthropology’s marginality” on the continent, the “near-absence of anthropology departments in African
institutions” (2010: 94). On the other hand, he stresses that in Africa, anthropologists tend to be seen as
idlers, people who “fail to give educated, scientific conclusions and decisions” (95) and thus fail to use
their knowledge to improve the lives of people. This revelation shames us for being so academic and for
not being more practical and engaged.

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