A History of Anthropological Theory

Citation

Erickson, P. A., & Murphy, L. D. (2021). A History of Anthropological Theory (6th ed.). University of Toronto Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy's textbook traces how anthropologists have explained human culture, society and biology, from ancient Greek writers to the early twenty-first century. The book is organised as a long sequence of short sections, each devoted to a period, a school or a single figure, and each, according to the publisher, supported by illustrations, key terms and study questions. It is designed to work on its own or alongside the companion anthology Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, which reprints primary texts. The sixth edition (about 400 pages, 52 black-and-white illustrations) is described by the publisher as offering more balanced coverage of the four fields of anthropology (cultural, biological, linguistic and archaeological), an entirely new section on the Anthropocene, and significantly revised discussions of public anthropology, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. Front matter includes a preface, a timeline and an introduction.

Part One: The Early History of Anthropological Theory

The first part begins with "Anthropology in Antiquity" and moves through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the voyages of geographical discovery, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It then covers nineteenth-century developments: the rise of positivism, Marxism, classical cultural evolutionism, the debate between evolutionism and diffusionism, archaeology's coming of age, and Charles Darwin and Darwinism. The part closes with individual sections on Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Max Weber and Ferdinand de Saussure, the thinkers from outside or at the edge of anthropology whose ideas later schools drew on.

Part Two: The Earlier Twentieth Century

This part is built around the two traditions that professionalised the discipline. "American Cultural Anthropology" treats Franz Boas, Robert Lowie and Alfred Louis Kroeber, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, followed by a section on the development of psychological anthropology. "British Social Anthropology" covers A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Edmund Leach, and Max Gluckman and the "Manchester School", and ends with an assessment of the tradition's legacy.

Part Three: The Later Twentieth Century

The largest part moves through the many approaches of the post-war decades. It begins with French structural anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, later structuralists, structural Marxists and Marshall Sahlins) and its legacy, then cognitive anthropology and the "new ethnography". Materialist and evolutionary lines follow: cultural neo-evolutionism (Leslie White, Julian Steward, Sahlins and Elman Service), the New Archaeology, and Marvin Harris's cultural materialism. A cluster on nature versus nurture covers the new physical anthropology, ethology and behavioural genetics, and sociobiology. "The Symbolic Turn" treats Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz and post-processual archaeology. Shorter sections address transactionalism and Fredrik Barth, anthropology and feminism, and political economy (world-system approaches, ideology, culture and power, and postcolonialism). The part ends with linguistic anthropology's coming of age (speech acts, the ethnography of communication, ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics), postmodernity (Paul Feyerabend, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, anthropology as text) and critical medical anthropology.

Part Four: The Early Twenty-First Century

The final part covers globalization; culture, gender and sexualities; and public anthropology, with sections on its development and controversies, on distinguishing public from applied anthropology, on debates over fieldwork ethics and the military, and on serving a global public. It then turns to "World Traditions and Collaborative Anthropology", which considers national traditions and the dominance of Anglo-American anthropology and collaboration with "other" voices, and ends with anthropologies of the digital age. The edition's new section on the Anthropocene, announced by the publisher, adds to this recent material.

Key Concepts

Part One

• Classical cultural evolutionism: the nineteenth-century view that societies pass through a common sequence of stages, the first major theory the book examines.
• Evolutionism versus diffusionism: the debate over whether similarities between cultures arise from parallel development or from borrowing.
• Positivism: the belief that society can be studied with the methods of the natural sciences, presented as a foundation for later social theory.

Part Two

• American cultural anthropology: the Boasian tradition centred on the study of culture, including culture-and-personality work and linguistic relativity (Sapir and Whorf).
• British social anthropology: the tradition of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski that studied social structure and institutions through fieldwork.
• Manchester School: Max Gluckman's group, presented alongside the later British tradition.

Part Three

• Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss's search for the underlying structures of thought behind cultural forms.
• Cultural neo-evolutionism and cultural materialism: the revival of evolutionary and materialist explanation by White, Steward, Sahlins, Service and Harris.
• Symbolic and interpretive anthropology: Turner's and Geertz's approaches to culture as symbols and meanings.
• Political economy and postcolonialism: approaches that place local societies within world systems and relations of power.
• Postmodernity and anthropology as text: critiques of authority and representation, including Foucault and Bourdieu.

Part Four

• Public anthropology: anthropology addressed to wider publics, distinguished in the book from applied anthropology.
• World and collaborative anthropologies: attention to national traditions outside the Anglo-American centre and to research done with, rather than on, communities.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Wide chronological reach. The table of contents runs from antiquity to anthropologies of the digital age, so the book covers both the long prehistory of anthropological ideas and the debates of the decades after 1990 in one volume.
• Four-field coverage. Alongside cultural and social anthropology, the contents include archaeology (from its nineteenth-century coming of age to the New Archaeology and post-processual archaeology), physical anthropology and sociobiology, and linguistic anthropology. The sixth edition explicitly aimed to balance these fields better.
• Built for teaching. Short, separately titled sections on individual figures make it easy to assign or skip material, and the publisher notes key terms and study questions throughout. The companion reader allows each section to be paired with original texts. Daniel Tubb (University of New Brunswick), in an endorsement printed by retailers, calls it a road map to the discipline's canon that is accessible to students and critical of it.
• Recent and wider voices. The contents give named sections to Zora Neale Hurston, feminism, postcolonialism, public anthropology, and national traditions outside the Anglo-American mainstream, so the book is not limited to a canon of male European and American founders.

Limitations

• Breadth over depth. With dozens of sections in about 400 pages, each figure or school receives only a few pages. The book serves as a map, not a substitute for reading Boas, Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss or Geertz.
• North American organisation. The four-field framing and the long sections on biological anthropology and archaeology reflect North American departments; students in European social anthropology programmes may find some material outside their syllabus, and the contents themselves note the "dominance of Anglo-America".
• Coverage ends around 2020. The most recent sections (globalization, the digital age, the Anthropocene) reflect the state of debate when the edition appeared in 2021.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is one of two histories that open the course. Eriksen and Nielsen's A History of Anthropology is a shorter narrative history that concentrates on social and cultural anthropology and links ideas to the people and institutions that produced them; Erickson and Murphy are more schematic, organised in short sections with study aids, and cover archaeology, biological and linguistic anthropology as well. Students who want a continuous story may prefer Eriksen and Nielsen; those who want a reference to revise schools, or who study in a four-field programme, will find this book more useful. Reading both gives two different views of the same history.

Mark Moberg's Engaging Anthropological Theory is a further historical account that ties theories to the social and political debates around them and expects some background, so it works well after one of the two histories. The course's primary texts sit inside the story told here: Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures belongs to the "symbolic turn" in Part Three, Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice to its section on postmodernity, and Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique, a call for experimental ethnographic writing, fits beside the section on "anthropology as text". Reading the relevant section first gives the context in which each argument was made.

How to Use This Book

The book is written for undergraduates in a first course on anthropological theory; an introductory course in cultural or social anthropology helps but is not required. Begin with the introduction and keep the timeline at hand, since the book moves back and forth between national traditions.

A practical plan for a one-semester theory course:

• Core: Part Two in full, and in Part Three the sections on structuralism, neo-evolutionism and cultural materialism, the symbolic turn, feminism, political economy and postmodernity. These are the schools most theory courses examine.
• Background: Part One can be read quickly, with closer attention to the sections from positivism to Saussure, which introduce ideas later schools build on.
• By programme: students in archaeology or biological anthropology should read the sections on archaeology's coming of age, the New Archaeology, the nature-versus-nurture cluster and post-processual archaeology closely; others can skim them.
• Recent debates: Part Four is useful for essays on public anthropology, collaboration and globalization, but should be supplemented with recent journal articles.

For each section, answer the study questions and pair it with at least one primary text, either from the companion Readings volume or from the course's own reading list. When writing essays, cite the original authors rather than the textbook's summary of them.