Appendix 1 A History of Theories in Anthropology

A10
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY
Early American anthropologists, such as Morgan,
Boas, and Kroeber, were interested in, and made
contributions to, more than a single subfield. If
there has been a single dominant trend in anthropology
since the 1960s, it has been one of increasing
specialization. During the 1960s, when this
author attended graduate school at Columbia
University, I had to study and take qualifying
exams in all four subfields. This has changed.
There are still strong four-field anthropology
departments, but many excellent departments
lack one or more of the subfields. Four-field
departments such as the University of Michigan’s
still require courses and teaching expertise across
the subfields, but graduate students must choose
to specialize in a particular subfield, and take
qualifying exams only in that subfield. In Boasian
anthropology, all four subfields shared a single
theoretical assumption about human plasticity.
Today, following specialization, the theories that
guide the subfields differ. Evolutionary paradigms
of various sorts still dominate biological
anthropology and remain strong in archaeology
as well. Within cultural anthropology, it has been
decades since evolutionary approaches thrived.
Ethnography, too, has grown more specialized.
Cultural anthropologists now head for the field
with a specific problem in mind, rather than with
the goal of producing a holistic ethnography—a
complete account of a given culture—as Morgan
and Malinowski intended when they studied,
respectively, the Iroquois and the people of the
Trobriand Islands. We’ve seen, too, in previous
chapters that “the field” has become more amorphous
over time. Boas, Malinowski, and Mead
went somewhere and stayed there for a while,
studying the local culture. Today the field has
expanded to include regional and national systems
and the movement of people, such as immigrants
and diasporas, across national boundaries.
Many anthropologists now follow the flows of
people, information, finance, and media to multiple
sites. Such movement has been made possible
by advances in transportation and communication.
However, with so much time in motion and
with the need to adjust to various field sites and
contexts, the richness of traditional ethnography
may diminish.
Anthropology also has witnessed a crisis in
representation—questions about the role of the
ethnographer and the nature of ethnographic
authority. What right do ethnographers have to
represent a people or culture to which they don’t
belong? Some argue that insiders’ accounts are
more valuable and appropriate than are studies
by outsiders, because native anthropologists not
only know the culture better, they also should be
in charge of representing their culture to the public.
Reflecting the trends just described, the AAA
(American Anthropological Association) now has
all sorts of subgroups. In its beginning, there
were just anthropologists within the AAA. Now
there are groups representing biological anthropology,
archaeology, and linguistic, cultural, and
applied anthropology, as well as dozens of
groups formed around particular interests and
identities. These groups represent psychological
anthropology, urban anthropology, culture and
agriculture, anthropologists in small colleges,
midwestern anthropologists, senior anthropologists,
lesbian and gay anthropologists, Latino/a
anthropologists, and so on. Many of the identitybased
groups accept the premise that group
members are better qualified to study issues and
topics involving that group than outsiders are.
The chapter “Cultural Exchange and Survival”
described postmodernity—our world in flux,
where mobile people manage multiple identities
depending on place and context. The term postmodern
refers to the blurring and breakdown
of established canons, categories, distinctions,
and boundaries. Postmodernity has influenced
anthropology in many ways. It has changed our
units of analysis. Postmodernism is like anthropology
itself in extending value beyond high culture
to the culture of ordinary people from all
over the world. Yet postmodern approaches in
anthropology also question established assumptions,
such as the outside ethnographer’s right to
represent. Science itself is challenged. Doubters
argue that science can’t be trusted because it
is carried out by scientists. All scientists, the
doubters contend, come from particular individual
or cultural backgrounds that prevent objectivity,
leading to artificial and biased accounts that
have no more value than do those of insiders who
are nonscientists.
What are we to do if we, as I do, continue to
share Mead’s view of anthropology as a humanistic
science of unique value in understanding and
improving the human condition? We must try to
stay aware of our biases and our inability totally
to escape them. The best scientific choice would
seem to be to combine the perpetual goal of objectivity
with skepticism about achieving it. Kluckhohn’s
statement (1944, p. 9) of the need for
anthropology’s scientific objectivity still stands:
“Anthropology provides a scientific basis for
dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world
today: how can peoples of different appearance,
mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar
ways of life get along peaceably together?” In this
world of failed states, terrorism, and preemptive
war, most anthropologists never would have chosen
their profession had they doubted that
anthropology could play a significant role in
answering such questions.