A History of Anthropology

Citation

Eriksen, T. H., & Nielsen, F. S. (2013). A History of Anthropology (2nd ed.). Pluto Press. Anthropology, Culture and Society series.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and a former president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and Finn Sivert Nielsen, who taught anthropology at Tromsø and Copenhagen, wrote a compact history of social and cultural anthropology (about 250 pages in nine chapters). The first edition appeared in 2001; Pluto describes the 2013 second edition as thoroughly updated and revised. According to the publisher, the book summarises "Enlightenment", "Romantic" and "Victorian" anthropology, including the often neglected German contribution, considers the ambiguous relationship between anthropology and national cultures, and follows theoretical developments from the 1920s to the present, with brief biographies of major anthropologists and coverage of debates such as totemism, kinship and globalisation. The chapter structure reflects a European, and especially British, French and German, perspective as much as an American one.

Chapter 1: Proto-Anthropology

The opening chapter looks for anthropology before anthropology: Herodotus and other Greeks, the period after antiquity, the European conquests and their impact, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. A section titled "Why All This is not Quite Anthropology Yet" marks the authors' point that curiosity about other peoples is not yet a discipline.

Chapter 2: Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman

Nineteenth-century evolutionism and cultural history are covered through Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, Adolf Bastian and the German tradition, Edward Tylor and other Victorians, The Golden Bough and the Torres Strait expedition, and German diffusionism. The chapter closes with "the new sociology" of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber.

Chapter 3: Four Founding Fathers

This chapter presents the projects of Bronislaw Malinowski (fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (a "natural science of society"), Franz Boas (historical particularism) and Marcel Mauss (the total social prestation), and ends with a comparison of the discipline's state in 1930, noting parallels and divergences between the four.

Chapter 4: Expansion and Institutionalisation

The authors follow anthropology as it became established in universities: Oxford and the LSE, Columbia and Chicago, the French Dakar–Djibouti expedition, culture and personality, cultural history, ethnolinguistics, the Chicago School, the study of kinship (which the authors call "kinshipology"), "functionalism's last stand" and some British outsiders. A section asks whether anthropology was still a marginal discipline.

Chapter 5: Forms of Change

Post-war approaches to change and economy are grouped here: neo-evolutionism and cultural ecology, the formalist–substantivist debate in economic anthropology, the methodological individualists at Cambridge, and role analysis and systems theory.

Chapter 6: The Power of Symbols

The move "from function to meaning" is traced through ethnoscience and symbolic anthropology, Clifford Geertz and David Schneider, and Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism with its early impact. The chapter ends with a survey of the state of the art in 1968.

Chapter 7: Questioning Authority

Challenges to the established schools are treated in sections on the return of Marx, structural Marxism, "the not-quite-Marxists", political economy and the capitalist world system, feminism and the birth of reflexive fieldwork, ethnicity, practice theory, and the sociobiology debate together with Samoa.

Chapter 8: The End of Modernism?

This chapter examines the late twentieth century: the postmodern critique, the postcolonial world, the question whether the new direction was a real departure or "a return to Boas", and other positions.

Chapter 9: Global Networks

The final chapter asks whether an international anthropology is emerging, and discusses trends for the future, relations between biology and culture, and globalisation and the production of locality.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: Proto-Anthropology to the Victorians

• Proto-anthropology: descriptions and theories of other peoples from Herodotus to the Romantics, before anthropology existed as a discipline.
• Evolutionism and diffusionism: nineteenth-century explanations of cultural difference by stages of development or by the spread of traits, the latter with a strong German tradition.

Chapters 3–4: Founders and Institutions

• Historical particularism: Boas's insistence that each culture be understood through its own history.
• Total social prestation: Mauss's idea that exchange involves the whole of social life at once.
• Kinship studies: the mid-century focus on kinship systems that the authors describe as "kinshipology".

Chapters 5–6: Change and Symbols

• Formalism and substantivism: the debate over whether market-based economic theory applies to non-market societies.
• From function to meaning: the shift from explaining institutions by their social functions to interpreting their symbols, represented by Geertz, Schneider and Lévi-Strauss.

Chapters 7–9: Critique and Globalisation

• Political economy and world system: approaches that place local societies within global capitalism.
• Practice theory: approaches that link social structure and individual action.
• Reflexive fieldwork and the end of modernism: the questioning of ethnographic authority from feminist and postmodern positions.
• Production of locality: how places and local identities are made within global networks.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Short and continuous. About 250 pages and nine chapters cover the field from the Greeks to globalisation as one connected narrative, which suits a reader who wants the overall shape of the discipline before the details.
• European breadth. Named sections on Bastian and the German tradition, German diffusionism, the Dakar–Djibouti expedition, Cambridge individualists and "British outsiders" give space to European traditions beyond the familiar British and American story; the publisher stresses the attention to German scholars and to anthropology's relationship with national cultures.
• Ideas in their settings. Sections on institutions (Oxford, the LSE, Columbia, Chicago) and periodic stock-takings ("Anthropology in 1930", "The State of the Art in 1968") show how theory developed through departments, expeditions and generations rather than as a list of isolated schools.
• Debates rather than only schools. The contents name specific controversies (formalism and substantivism, the sociobiology debate, whether the postmodern turn was "a return to Boas"), which helps students see what was at stake.

Limitations

• Social and cultural anthropology only. Archaeology, biological anthropology and linguistics appear only where they touch social theory (for instance ethnolinguistics and the sociobiology debate); students in four-field programmes need another source for those fields.
• Brief treatment of each figure. With dozens of figures and schools in nine chapters, the book is a map; it cannot replace the primary texts.
• Last revised in 2013. The final chapter's discussion of globalisation and future trends reflects the state of the field at that date; later debates are not covered.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is one of two histories that open the course. Erickson and Murphy's A History of Anthropological Theory is a longer textbook organised in short sections with key terms and study questions, covering archaeology, biological and linguistic anthropology as well as social and cultural theory, with a companion volume of readings. Eriksen and Nielsen offer a shorter, more continuous narrative with a European emphasis. Students who want to understand how the discipline grew should start here; those who need a revision reference or study in a four-field programme will find Erickson and Murphy more useful. Using both gives two perspectives on the same events.

Mark Moberg's Engaging Anthropological Theory, another historical account that links theories to the social and political debates around them, fits after this book. The course's primary texts can be placed in Eriksen and Nielsen's chapters: Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures in Chapter 6, Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice under practice theory in Chapter 7, and Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique, with its call for experimental ethnographic writing, alongside the debates of Chapter 8.

How to Use This Book

The publisher presents the book as suitable for students at all levels, and it assumes no previous study of anthropology, although a first course in social or cultural anthropology helps in recognising the names and debates.

A practical plan:

• Read it straight through early. At this length the whole book can be read in the first weeks of a theory course, giving a framework for the primary texts that follow.
• Core for most theory courses: Chapters 3 and 6–8, covering the founders, the symbolic and structuralist turn, the Marxist, feminist and practice-theory challenges, and the postmodern critique.
• Background: Chapters 1–2 explain where the discipline's questions came from; Chapters 4–5 are useful for courses on economic anthropology, kinship or the British and American traditions.
• Recent debates: Chapter 9 introduces globalisation and the relationship between biology and culture; supplement it with more recent work.

When a course assigns a primary text, reread the relevant section first and note how the authors place it in relation to what came before and after. Use the book's account to compare positions in essays, but cite the original authors rather than the summary.