George Stocking and Victorian Anthropology

Social Anthropology as Intellectual History:

Stocking’s Victorian Anthropology and After Tylor
Jose Harris

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The political philosophers of ancient Athens puzzled incessantly over
the question of how far human nature and human social structures
were fundamentally different in different places, periods, and cultures;
or whether, at some deep analytical level, they were ‘everywhere the
same’, like air, water and fire. The same question has been for centuries
one of the hallmarks of political and social theorising in Britain.
Seventeenth century contractarians, Christian politico-theologians,
philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment, exponents of classical
political economy, Benthamite utilitarians, Victorian idealists (always
more Platonist then Hegelian) , and twentieth century analytical
positivists - all vastly differed from each other in many other respects,
but they nevertheless pursued a common quest for psychological and
societal laws that were both universally valid and analogous with laws
in the natural world. All involved a ‘strippeddown’ model of naked
humanity in trans-historical settings, as a peg on which to hang ideas
about perception, structure, and social explanation. Such an approach
has never been without its persuasive critics (Burke, Ruskin, Maitland,
and J.M. Keynes to name but a few). It has also of course overlapped
with similar intellectual vantage-points in other countries (not least in
France where the engines of positivism and other modes of univer-
salism have never ceased to be powerful). In the British (or Anglo-
Scottish) tradition, however, such a thrust has been perhaps uniquely
pervasive and long-lasting. And lurking behind this goal and method-
ology has been a more elusive and perhaps more peculiarly British
sentiment - the hope that if such laws could be discovered, ‘good’
would be achieved by the very fact of such knowledge. In all of this
there has been little sense of the bleaker (e.g. Levi-Straussian)view, that
universalist social understanding must necessarily change, subvert and
disenchant the society whose agents perform the very act of ‘knowing’.’
As an approach to the study of society this British search for objective
universal laws has met with varying degrees of success (‘success’ here
implying not establishment of unquestioned truth, but effectiveness
in commanding general assent or influencing action). An example of
‘success’ is the rational-positivist model of Anglo-Scottish political
economy: a model which (after the Marxian and Keynesian hiccups of
the earlier twentieth century) now appears once again to be sweeping
all before it - located no longer specificallyin Britain but remorselessly

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transplanted (via the global influence of the United States) into all
the nations of the world. And similarly the abstract methodological
individualism of mainstream British political theory (having been
pronounced ‘dead’ forty years ago) is once again a major building-

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block of (Anglo)-American liberal political philosophy - called into
question, but scarcely equalled in preeminence, by various strands of
late-Marxian ‘critical’ thought and by neo-communitarianism.
In other spheres of social explanation, however, positivistic univer-
salism has met with a much more limited or more transient reception.
Though long influential in the construction of social and political
history, few historians of Britain any longer see British institutions
as the broad highway along which all other world cultures are pre-
destined eventually to follow. Foucauldian deconstructionism has
gone far in undermining the confidence of earlier generations in the
detached ‘rational bureaucratic’ structures of medicine, criminology,
and social policy. Leavisite literary criticism -which in the 1950s sought
to project universalist critical values through the medium of great
English literature - has long since disappeared down a cultural dark
hole. The universalist pretensions of British sociology - perceived by its
critics as hopelessly led astray by evolutionary positivism and rational
individualism - have long been treated as a standing joke among intel-
lectual historians, ever since Talcott Parsons pronounced ‘the coroner’s
verdict’ upon the legacy of Herbert Spencer.
Does the same verdict apply to sociology’s more prestigeful elder
twin? i.e. to the tradition of ethnology and ‘social anthropology’, that
stretches from early-Victorian paternalist concern for ‘primitive
peoples’ - via mid-Victorian social evolutionism and post-Victorian
diffusionism, funtionalism and structural-functionalism - through to
the more broadly-conceived ‘cultural anthropology’ of the present day?
In 18’71 the doyen of late-Victorian anthropologists, Edward Tylor,
could claim with absolute confidence that it was ‘no more reasonable
to suppose the laws of mind differently constituted in Australia and in
England, in the time of the cavedwellers and in the time of the builders
of sheet-iron houses, than to suppose that the laws of chemical
combination were of one sort in the time of the coal-measures, and are
of another now’. But at the end of the twentieth century many anthro-
pologists throughout western society see any such approach not just
as misconceived but as morally and politically improper. In the more
‘humane’ of the social sciences it appears that the ancient quest for
cognitive and substantive unity, mediated into the modern world
through enlightenment and positivist thought, has - at any rate for the
present moment - come to an end.

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 George Stocking and VictorianAnthropology

To find out how and why this change has occurred in the sphere
of anthropological studies, the historian must necessarily turn to the
oeuvre of Professor George Stocking: to Stocking’s writings on the
social, intellectual, and institutional history of British anthropology,

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and to his editorship of a monumental series of reprints of classic
writings on social and cultural anthropology dating from the early
nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century. Stocking’s edited
volumes and collections of essays have long figured widely in academic
reading-lists on such topics as ‘historiography’, ‘methodology’ and
‘inter-disciplinary approaches’ to history. Yet, despite the acclaim
accorded them by world-famous anthropological theorists, his two
major interpretative works - VictorianAnthropology (1987) and Afer Tylm
(1995) - have up to now made less impact on Victorian and post-
Victorian cultural and intellectual history than the depth, breadth, and
intrinsic importance of their subject-matter might lead one to expect.
Stocking himself disarmingly tells us in one of his essaycollections that,
even in his own University of Chicago, his work has been less appre-
ciated by historians than by fellow-members of the Department of
Anthropology - the former apparently objecting that he was not able
to ‘paint the big picture’ and could only produce vignette^'.^ Yet
Stocking’s time-frame is undoubtedly historical; and although his
narrative deals with the unravelling of often highly technical and
epistemological debates among anthropological theorists and field-
workers, it may be argued that it is as ‘intellectual history’ that the
coherence and plausibility of his interpretation stands or falls. Indeed,
Stocking himself is sensitive to this fact, clearly stating his intention to
locate his actors in the idioms and cultures of their own epochs, and to
resist the slide into the patronising presentism that historical writing on
scientific disciplines often entails. His declared goal is the ‘historicist’
one of ‘privileging ... the questions to which the thinking of Victorian
anthropologists provided answers, rather than questions that might be
asked about related issues by anthropologists today’ ( VA, 285). The aim
is not to be vacuously impartial, but to ‘focus on the body of traditional
meanings that condition the behaviour of every individual growing up
in a particular cultural milieu’.
Why then have Stocking’s two major works so far been only rather
selectively and peripherally absorbed into critical understanding of
British intellectual history? One possible answer is simply a matter of
time-lag - that these are detailed and densely-packed works on highly
technical themes which will take years to digest into the mainstream of
the history of ideas. Yet this can scarcely be very weighty reason, since
Stocking’s narrative deals with a whole cluster of issues - empire, race,

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mind, perception, ritual, Darwinism, shifting paradigms, the structure

of intellectual elites - that are already central to historical writing on
the period (not merely among ‘intellectual’ historians, but among
historians in general). Another possible factor might be the obstinate

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parochialism of British historians (or of historians who write about
Britain) and their residual attachment to ‘Whiggish’and/or ‘positivist’
notions of historical truth that modern cultural anthropology neces-
sarily tends to undermine. But, whatever may be the case with British
historiography in general, it can scarcely apply here, since Stocking’s
historicization of social evolution and anthropological positivism had
already been anticipated by two of the most acute, original, and anti-
positivist historians writing in the English language, namely John
Burrow and Robert Young4 Burrow in particular has been a com-
manding influence both in the history of Victorian anthropology, and
in nineteenth-century history more generally, since the mid-1960s.
Stocking’s slant on wider Victorian history certainly differs from that of
Burrow, and he takes issue with Burrow on a number of specific points
(such as whether evolutionary positivism constituted a real break with
utilitarian positivism, or merely recast it in a slightly different guise).
But, so far as their depictions of Victorian anthropology and ethnology
are concerned, their differences are ones of degree and emphasis
rather than kind; and, viewed as an essay in disciplinary history, it would
be difficult to claim that Victorian Anthropology fundamentally overturns
the picture familiar to historians of Victorian Britain since Burrow’s
Evolution and Society was published in 1966.
The clue to Stocking’s (thus far) surprisingly limited absorption by
intellectual and cultural historians seems to me therefore to lie else-
where. Despite the dense texture of his narrative, I believe that there
is a certain lack of congruity and coherence between his detailed
historical case-studies and the larger theoretical and interpretative
frameworks in which they are set. This explanatory hiatus can be
detected at several different though inter-related levels: first, there is a
gap between Professor Stocking’s statement of historical and philo-
sophical intent and his authorial practice; secondly, there is a gap
between his concrete examples and his overall characterisation of
British anthropological thought; and, thirdly, there is a gap between the
latter and the wider historic, institutional, and ‘racial’ culture of nine-
teenth and twentieth century Britain. In both his major works there is
a recurrent sense that, while his account of the ideas of individual
British anthropologists is full of insight and variety, the overarching
theory is bought off the peg from some other culture; like their own
sartorial impositions upon the lives of savages, the theory fits the

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mental visions of the Victorians and their lineal descendants like an

awkwardly fitting suit of clothes.
Let us take first the contents and argument of VictorianAnthropology.
Professor Stocking’s case-studies of pre- and post-Darwinian cultural

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confrontations and perspectives are richly informative and rewarding.
They draw out in a very deft and illuminating manner the subtle
changes of emphasis in the thought of individual anthropologists, the
finer points of debate between rival kinship theorists, and the different
social and ideological assumptions that could be invisibly embedded in
apparently very similar conceptual language (‘Aryan’,for example, had
a wide range of possible meanings, many of them utterly remote from
its sinister, late-twentieth century, connotation). We learn a great deal
about such themes as the conflict between ‘monogenetic’ and ‘poly-
genetic’ theories of human heredity, the clash between patriarchy
and matriarchy as prototypes of primitive culture, and about the mid-
Victorian institutional rivalry between (humanitarian) Ethnologists
and (scientistic) Anthropologists. A seminal chapter deals with the
widely varying anthropological responses to the shock of Darwin (the
evolutionary models of Lamarck and Herbert Spencer remaining at
least as prevalent among both armchair theorists and data-collectors
until the end of the nineteenth century). Throughout the book we see
anthropologically-engaged Victorians at work in a complex variety of
guises (not just the tiny minority with toeholds in universities, but
missionaries, administrators, journalists, amateur naturalists and
ethnographers, and many others). All are portrayed as struggling
to make sense of the non-stop mental explosions of mid-Victorian
England: the enormously enlarged physical universe; the immense
elongation of historic time; the revelations and riddles of the fossil
record; and - most challenging of all - the threat to familiar religious
and secular assumptions posed by the presence of ‘primitive’or ‘savage’
peoples, newly encountered in many parts of the globe. Reactions
to the latter varied from shock-horror at cannibalism and primitive
promiscuity, and amused contempt at their ‘puerile’ and ‘ludicrous’
irrationality, through to cultivated tolerance in the face of human
difference (‘personal intercourse seldom fails to produce at last a more
favourable impression’) and even on occasion to ‘the hope, however
naive, of rapid amalgamation into a harmonious and egalitarian
multiracial society’. The vast majority of Victorians, both religious and
secular, resisted suggestions that savages might belong to a different
genus or species, and reaffirmed the traditional Judaeo-Christian
ontology of the unity of mankind. But by the latter half of the Victorian
period the master-clue to differences between different human

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societies was widely conceived in terms of various models of evolution;

human beings were all journeying up the same staircase, obeying the
same invisible societal laws, but some were proceeding at a much faster
pace than the rest.

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Such complexity and variety seems to cry out for the subtle process
of historical contextualisation set out in Professor Stocking’s initial
statement of intent and endorsed in his epilogue. So the reader is
therefore somewhat taken aback to find a rather different perspective
constantly obtruding itself into the main body of the narrative.
Stocking rightly concedes that, faced with immensely challenging
intellectual questions, Victorian anthropologists ‘answered them as
best they could’; yet it seems that they were at the same time guilty ‘to a
rather greater degree than subsequent anthropological viewpoints’ of
the crime of ‘privileging the assumptions of [their] own culture’. Thus,
in the course of witnessing ‘modes of behaviour which even the
staunchest modern relativist might have trouble coping with: canni-
balism, patricide, widow strangling, wife spearing, and infanticide’, they
singularly failed to ‘conceptualise what they saw, in terms of the
modern anthropological idea of culture’. They failed also to convert
evolutionary theory into anything like ‘normal science’, their am-
bitions in that direction being constantly vitiated by ideological
preconceptions, ‘ulterior personal motive’, and by the grounding even
of technical problems like kinship in ‘ulterior Victorian assumption’.
The best they could do was to supply a ‘counter science’ for classical
political economy, by constructing a framework of explanation for
behaviour that, by economic standards, had ‘no rational utilitarian
justification’. Although they were themselves institutionally ‘marginal’
to most of wider Victorian society, anthropologists nevertheless success-
fully used social evolutionary theory to provide both a ‘cosmic vindi-
cation’ for Victorian sexual repression and a ‘cosmic genealogy for
middle-class civilisation’. Victorian theorists themselves seem to have
been unaware of these shortcomings, being largely untouched by the
more relativist perspectives of, for example, German anthropological
idealism; and indeed ‘some viewpoint more consonant with modern
holistic or functionalist approaches’ only became available during the
course of the twentieth century.
All this sits rather oddly with Professor Stocking’s goal of locating
historical actors strictly within their ‘particular cultural milieu’, and
leads him unaccountably to simplify and gloss over an anthropological
culture that (by his own showing) was remarkably diverse, wide-
ranging, contentious and pluralistic. A similar ambivalence pervades
After Tylor; British Social Anthropology 1888-1951. Here once again

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 George Stocking and Victorian Anthropology

Stocking sets out with the best of historical intentions: ‘I seek to

understand the contexts and modes of thought, expression and action
of people who lived in worlds which, though continuous with, were
rather different from my own ... I have chosen as historian rather to

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represent than to criticise them. To this end, I rely heavily on the actual
words of my actors’. And, greatly to Stocking’s credit, he does exten-
sively cite their own words - presenting us with a dramatis personae of
quite extraordinary men, struggling to come to terms, not just with the
Victorian explosion in external ‘material’ knowledge, but with the post-
Victorian revolution in subjective awareness of the human sub-
conscious. Chief among his actors are the monumental arch-rationalist,
Sir James Frazer, perched in his study at Trinity College, Cambridge,
desperately battering the age-old dreams and visions of the human
psyche into modern mechanical constructions: the subvertor of
rationalism, William Robertson Smith, recovering ‘the old joyous type
of worship’ long lost to western puritanism, in the ‘merry sacrificial
feast’ of tribal ceremonial; W.H. Rivers, mediator of Freud and mentor
to shell-shocked war poets, bent upon devising an ethnographic
epistemology that would discard all Victorian residues of will and con-
scious purpose: Bronio Malinowski, an iconic figure of the ‘modern’
movement, pursuing the art of field-work (‘I-witnessing’)to its ultimate
limits, and refining social theory (as in a cubist painting) to a formal
analysis of abstract timeless function: and ‘Rex’ Radcliffe-Brown, a
modernist of a quite different kind, promoting cultural pluralism and
the prising apart of ‘evolutionism’from residual notions of an upward
ladder of ‘progress’. In its account of all these figures, Afer Tylor is an
original and seminal work (probably more significant than Victorian
Anthropology, in that it deals with less familiar characters and subject-
matter, and with a post-Victorian frame of reference that is more
complex and wide-ranging).
Once again, however, and despite Stocking’s declared intention to
the contrary, there is a constant undercurrent of evaluation of suc-
cessive generations of British anthropological theorists, with reference
not to their own immediate culture but to criteria from another time
and another place. The book catalogues dramatic epistemic shifts
from evolutionism to diffusionism, from functionalism to ‘hyphenated
functionalism’, and from militant rationalism to an ever-increasing
acknowledgement of the role of the ‘irrational’. It is hard to imagine
four more contrasting figures working within the same discipline and
culture than the five men mentioned above (let alone the host of lesser
figures who appear in Stocking’s narrative). But even so, he concludes
that the overall story is one of ‘an essentially linear structure, cul-

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minating in an archetype’. A common vein of ‘epistemological

ethnocentrism’ is identified as the defective intellectual norm, as
opposed to the ‘quite differently constituted cultural categorisations’
that were concurrently evolving within anthropology in North America.

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In Britain there remained a lurking penchant for ‘real facts’, for a
‘single universal standard of empirical knowledge’, for ‘universallyvalid
social laws’,and for a uniformitarian ‘history of mankind’ - in contrast
to the open-ended cultural and ethical relativism prescribed by the
school of the German-born North American anthropologist, Franz
Boas. Even the ‘new anthropology’ of Rivers, probably the most subtle
of English ethnological theorists, could not free itself from ‘a certain
conception of explanation in terms of ‘origin’, often construed as
rational or utilitarian ‘motive’, either in the present or in the past’.
Moreover, despite the ‘functionalist’ interests of Malinowski and the
‘sacramentalist’ perspective of Robertson Smith, British anthro-
pologists are portrayed as remaining unduly concerned with narrow
issues of kinship and social structure: ‘alone among the anthropologists
of the world’ the British made no use of the concept of ‘culture’, and
there was ‘no British analogue of the critique of racism that Franz Boas
had developed in the United States’.
These are technical judgements about changing perspectives,
fashions, and methodologies within the international discipline of
academic anthropology, and discussion of them is perfectly appropriate
within the context of a disciplinary history (hence the interest in Stock-
ing’s work shown by eminent anthropologists). This does not however
convert the history of Victorian or Edwardian British anthropology into
wide ‘intellectual history’, for the historian is scarcely concerned with
whether or not a particular past anthropological outlook does or does
not conform to the canons of the discipline currently deemed
acceptable in the University of Chicago in 1999. He or she is much more
concerned with (in Professor Stocking’swords) ‘meanings ... in a par-
ticular cultural milieu’. Moreover, the historian requires that milieu to
be carefully and accurately identified; and this brings me to my third
caveat about the status of Stocking’swork as ‘intellectual history’, and
that is the rather uncertain placing of his actors and their theories
within the context of their own society and culture. Some reference has
already been made to the apparent ambiguity of his comments on the
institutional salience of anthropology within Victorian Britain (it is
depicted both as utterly ‘marginal’ to wider society and as a power-
house for the forging of an over-arching, hegemonic, middleclass
‘cosmic ideology’). The depiction of anthropologists as definitively
‘middle-class’likewise presents problems, since it is hard to detect any

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serious community of class interest between, say, a lordly banker like

John Lubbock and a self-taught artisan-naturalist like Alfred Russel
Wallace - or, at a later date, between an imperial proconsul like Lord
Lugard (concerned to purge anthropology of ‘the “bounder”, the

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“prig”, and the “bookworm”’) and a cosmopolitan intellectual like
Malinowski (himself the embodiment of many classic ‘bounderish’
traits!).
There is a similar uncertainty in Stocking’s account of Victorian and
post-Victorian attitudes to race. In Victorian Anthropology he concludes
that ‘there can be little doubt that a pervasive evolutionary racism
contributed to the dehumanisation and objectification of anthro-
pology’s human subject matter’, and that both ethnology and anthro-
pology were ‘enveloped in a pervasive ethnocentric aura of racial
and cultural hierarchy’. Even in its most strongly environmentalist and
anti-biological forms, the evolutionary turn of mind was inherently
‘racialist’, in that it projected negative judgements about different
human cultures through time rather than space; the very act of
thinking ‘diachronically’ subverted the notion that all epochs and
cultures were equally valid. Moreover, the same underlying purpose
characterised the post-evolutionary rise of functionalism: the ‘function
of functionalism’ was to legitimise the re-ordering of ‘traditional native
systems’ in European terms. Yet Stocking also suggests that there was a
‘pervasive looseness’ in the terminology of race, and that even those
classed as ‘social Darwinists’ did not interpret ‘human progress
primarily in terms of racial conflict’. ‘Pervasive paternalistic Victorian
racialism’ scarcely accounts for a ‘missionary ethnographer’ like
R.H. Codrington, who ‘saw himself in a kind of united front with
gentlemen savages against “colonial loafers”’. Moreover, there were
many Victorians for whom the word ‘race’ was synonymous with ‘what
an anthropologist today would call “culture”’ (a point that could be
elaborated with reference to many other spheres of Victorian and post-
Victorian social life, from sources far outside the realm of anthropol-
ogy). ‘Carrying much of the meaning that “culture”does today, “race”
was a kind of summation of historically accumulated moral differences
sustained and slowly modified from generation to generation’.
How are these apparent contradictions to be explained - between
authorial intention and historical practice, between the wide-ranging
plurality of Professor Stocking’s case-studies and the unilinear
sequence of development outlined in his conclusions? One answer lies
in an irreconcilable clash of disciplinary perspectives. Despite their
apparent affinities, cultural anthropology and history are (currently at
least) two discrete disciplines, with two quite different frameworks and

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social epistemologies. While the one abjures all diachronic analysis as

implicitly patronising, the other views pure synchronism as devoid of
explanatory power; while the one insists that meaning is totally trans-
historical, the other looks for it in finite context. Professor Stocking

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deploys the techniques and source materials of the intellectual
historian, but his fundamental framework is one of philosophic com-
mitment to the universal cultural relativism of Boasian cultural
anthropology. Such a framework can and must tolerate anything -
except the existence of that rival mode of universalism, which for many
centuries asserted the validity of such non-relativist principles as
objective knowledge, ‘natural’ social laws, and the psychic unity of
mankind. The Victorians, as prominent practitioners of the rival mode,
must necessarily fall foul of late-twentieth century cultural criticism.
This explains why, despite all Stocking’s ‘historicizing’endeavours, one
is left with the impression that there is one rule for cannibals and wife-
stranglers, quite another for anthropological Victorians.
(Universityof Oxford)
Endnotes
1. C. Levi-Strauss, Testes Tropiques (2nd ed., New York, trans. J. and D. Weightman,
1997), 443.
2. Talcott Parsons, The Structuw ofSociaE Action (1937; Free Press ed., Glencoe, Illinois,
1949), 3.
3. George W. Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays (Madison, Wis.:
Winconsin University Press, 1992), 3.
4. John Burrow, Euolution and Society. A Study i n Victurian Social Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1966);Robert Young, Darwin’s Metaphm Nature’s Place in
Vzcta‘an CuEture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Presentism and Historicism Once Again:

The History of British Anthropology as Intellectual
and Personal History
George Stocking

Although Victorian Anthropology and Afer Tylor represent a major phase

of my scholarly career, and embody what may be the best work of
which I am capable, they are now part of my past, and to reengage them
seriously would distract from what will probably be my last project:
essays on aspects of American anthropology between 1945 and 1972.
Reconsidering Victm‘an Anthropology and Afer Tylor in their generative
context, as opposed to that of their reception, it should be noted that it
was in the latter part of this postwar period that the project which

328