First off, the title is somewhat misleading. Ingold’s purpose is not to distinguish anthropology from ethnography, but to criticize the “the idea of a one-way progression from ethnography to anthropology” in which methodological rigor precedes theoretical generalization. The title really should read: “Anthropological reasoning is not inductive, but dialectical.” He wants to challenge the dichotomy which places ethnographic description on the one side and anthropological theorizing on the other.

We can still recognise today the figure of the ‘social theorist’, sunk in his armchair or more likely peering from behind his computer screen, who presumes to be qualified, by virtue of his standing as an intellectual, to pronounce upon the ways of a world with which he involves himself as little as possible, preferring to interrogate the works of others of his kind. At the other extreme is the lowly ‘ethnographic researcher’, tasked with undertaking structured and semi-structured interviews with a selected sample of informants and analysing their contents with an appropriate software package, who is convinced that the data he collects are ethnographic simply because they are qualitative. These figures are the fossils of an outmoded distinction between empirical data collection and abstract theoretical speculation, and I hope we can all agree that there is no room for either in anthropology.

Against this he juxtaposes a view of anthropology as a craft (a view which Rex has elaborated in a series of posts on this blog).

For it is characteristic of craft that both the practitioner’s knowledge of things, and what he does to them, are grounded in intensive, respectful and intimate relations with the tools and materials of his trade. Indeed, anthropologists have long liked to see themselves as craftsmen among social scientists, priding themselves on the quality of their handiwork by contrast to the mass-produced goods of industrial data-processing turned out by sociologists and others.

As I understand it, the emphasis on craftsmanship is an effort to shift the focus from the tools of the trade — qualitative data collection techniques — to the ethnographer herself. The ethnographer is a researcher who has cultivated in herself an “anthropological attitude”:

The endeavour is essentially comparative, but what it compares are not bounded objects or entities but ways of being. It is the constant awareness of alternative ways of being, and of the ever-present possibility of ‘flipping’ from one to another, that defines the anthropological attitude. It lies in what I would call the ‘sideways glance’.

He defines this “sideways glance” as “a practice of observation grounded in participatory dialog.” Through the course of this dialog anthropologists swing back and forth like a pendulum between anthropological theorizing and ethnographic description.

But I have started this discussion at the conclusion, and Ingold’s own process of getting there is as important as where he ends up. Much of the essay is, in fact, a dialog with Radcliffe-Brown, and the kind of anthropology he proposed. It both seeks to defend R-B from his critics, as well as to correct some of his contradictions and excesses. I am not particularly concerned about defending or attacking R-B’s place in the anthropological cannon, but I do find the shifting framework of Ingold’s discussion to be quite fascinating. He starts with Kroeber’s critique of R-B’s approach as a form of ahistorical classification, to which Kroeber opposed a form of “descriptive integration.” Just as the artist does not see a landscape as a “multitude of particulars” so too does Kroeber’s anthropologist seek to render the particulars into a coherent whole rather than viewing them as an incoherent jigsaw puzzle of unconnected parts.

This integrative approach leads to an interesting question: “the anthropologist describes the social world as the artist paints a landscape, then what becomes of time?”

Kroeber came to the conclusion that time, in the chronological sense, is inessential to history. Presented as a kind of ‘descriptive cross-section’ or as the characterisation of a moment,a historical account can just as well be synchronic as diachronic.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard was to take up Kroeber’s view of time, juxtaposing it to that of R-B “for whom history was nothing more than ‘a record of a succession of unique events’ and social anthropology nothing less than ‘a set of general propositions.’”

It was left to Edmund Leach to defend R-B, although his defense was at best a backhanded one. Leach complained that his colleagues had “given up in the attempt to make comparative generalizations” for “butterfly collecting” (by which he meant “impeccably detailed historical ethnographies of particular peoples”). However, he felt that R-B’s approach to comparative generalization overemphasized the “generalization” part rather than the “comparison” part which Leach felt was more important.

A generalisation, then, would take the form not of a typological specification that would enable us to distinguish societies of one kind from those of another, but of a statement of the relationships between variables that may operate in societies of any kind.

It is here that Ingold leaps to R-B’s defense, arguing that R-B did not see social life as a collection of static, ahistorical taxonomic specimens, but rather as “a process.” Ingold argues that Leach’s criticism could much better be applied to his beloved Levi-Strauss than R-B. But Ingold is nonetheless critical of R-B’s view of “social life” as being dichotomous with the internal (psychological) life of the mind. Such an approach “implies the closure and completion of a system of relations that has been fully joined up” as opposed to a processual view of social life as “open ended and never complete.” It is here that Ingolds discussion of R-B and his view of anthropology as a craft dovetail, for:

It follows that any endeavour of so-called descriptive integration, if it is to do justice to the implicate order of social life, can be neither descriptive nor theoretical in the specific senses constituted by their opposition. It must rather do away with the opposition itself.

If social life is a process, then our method for investigating it must itself eschew the opposition between lived experience and theoretical generalization, and must emphasize instead the shared experience of the anthropologist and her subjects with whom knowledge is collaboratively generated through dialog.

Having concluded my summary of Ingold’s argument, I have some questions:

• Does our epistemology necessarily need to reflect our ontology? I’m not convinced it does… In any case, it seems that the case for this needs to be made rather than simply assumed.
• How much of this is boundary maintenance? Real anthropologists are those who have an undefinable savoir faire, as opposed to those pesky applied folks, or ethnographers in other disciplines, who have only learned our methodological tools.
• What is left, after this discussion, of generalizing theory? I’m not really clear. My sense is that Ingold ends up collapsing theory into ethnography, undermining his own argument. But I’m not sure about that. I have the feeling I need to read Ingold’s other work to get a better grip on where he is coming from.
• I think one of the things I like most here is the critique of the postmodern “assemblage” view which revels in complexity. It seems that Ingold is staking out a middle ground, but again, I’m left a little uncertain where this might be?

I look forward to hearing what our readers have to say!

One does not need to think of Bohanan’s work among the Tiv of northern Nigeria, or Abner Cohen’s research among Hausa migrants in the southern Nigerian city of Ibadan before one experiences a feeling of nostalgia. There were for instance Nigerians like Angulu Onwujeogwu, Ikenna Nzimora and Victor Uchendu. In Africa at large, efforts were not just expended on doing ‘good’ anthropology and sociology; there were in fact efforts to overcome the Western epistemic assumptions that underpinned much anthropological exercise of the time. I probably don’t need to mention that anthropology was often a tool for colonialists. See, for instance, Bernard Magubane’s criticism of colonial anthropology in this Current Anthropology article. It would also be useful to see Archie Mafeje’s article that is partly a response to Magubane’s article. The point is that there was a lively discussion in anthropology on the continent.

A cursory look at the credentials of many African anthropologists of the 60s and 70s would show that they were largely Western educated, partly because African states, at that point, had a developmental agenda, and that agenda involved awarding scholarships to students to study in Western universities. And when this was not the case, many African got scholarships from Western countries. One could say that even then, with newly independent African states, anthropology was not particularly popular. I think this is linked to the involvement of anthropology in the colonial project. It is arguable that sociology enjoyed a better image than anthropology, especially with its somewhat better image as a discipline that studies ‘more civilised’ societies. That is also probably why there are very few stand-alone anthropology departments in Nigerian universities.

Things became much worse in the 80s when Nigeria’s oil wealth started turning into a curse. Serious balance of payment problems, coupled with a succession of repressive military dictatorships finally encouraged many Nigerian scholars to leave the country, and those who stayed found it increasingly difficult to work. The already unattractive anthropology even became less attractive, and joint anthropology and sociology department started doing much less of anthropology and more of sociology. The fact that many development agencies want statistical data has meant that data provision and generation concentrated in the hands of economists and sociologists. This in turn meant that fewer people got interested in doing graduate degrees in anthropology. I recently visited a Nigerian sociology and anthropology department where there was neither a single lecturer who does anthropological research, nor any graduate student who wanted to do anthropological research.

It is also in this state of the Nigerian economy state that many parents would not be willing to pay for their children to study anthropology in universities. One could also add that a desire to be modern, and therefore to study something modern, is linked to the lack of interest in anthropology, especially as people still seem to associate anthropology with the study of the primitive – in post-colonial studies terms, the Other. There is bound to be a problem for a discipline that studies the Other, when the classical definition of the Other in this context would actually be the self. I know that the experiences of people in African countries are far from uniform, and that there is of course a multiplicity of Others, but those are the fine details that almost always get lost in the quest for modernity. Yes, I throw in that word, because no matter how much we discuss the faults and failings of modernisation as a theory and as a concept, the everyday lives of young Nigerians is modeled after the dream of becoming modern. Of course, I am an anthropologist, and I understood the importance of the kind of knowledge that anthropological methods and methodologies produce, even before I decided to do a Ph.D in anthropology. And of course, there are also other really intelligent anthropologists still in Nigeria. But when one starts framing a discussion in those terms one should realise that one is talking of the exceptions and not the rule.

Some questions of course beg answers. Does Nigeria, and by extension other African countries, have need of the anthropologist’s contribution in its present predicament? Can the problems thrown up in the country be framed in anthropological ways? Are these problems not always being framed in such ways whether or not people realize or admit it, whether or not people study their society, its mental, material and behavioural artefacts, and engage one another, self and other, with the benefit of ethnographic and theoretical training received in university departments of anthropology? At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I think that it is always anthropology, good or bad—from Huntington to Soyinka.

Any insights from other areas?

The interviews were started by Jack Goody in 1982. He arranged for the filming of seminars by Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes and M.N.Srinivas. Since then, with the help of others, and particularly Sarah Harrison, I have filmed and edited over ninety archival interviews. Having started with leading anthropologists, my subjects have broadened to include other social scientists and, recently, biological and physical scientists.

The full list of interviews can be found here.

By all accounts, though, Mauss was never taken completely seriously in his role of heir apparent; a man of extraordinary erudition (he knew at least a dozen languages, including Sanskrit, Maori and classical Arabic), he still, somehow, lacked the gravity expected of a grand professeur. A former amateur boxer, he was a burly man with a playful, rather silly manner, the sort of person always juggling a dozen brilliant ideas rather than building great philosophical systems. He spent his life working on at least five different books (on prayer, on nationalism, on the origins of money, etc.), none of which he ever finished. Still, he succeeded in training a new generation of sociologists and inventing French anthropology more or less single-handedly, as well as in publishing a series of extraordinarily innovative essays, just about each one of which has generated an entirely new body of social theory all by itself.

Mauss was also a revolutionary socialist. From his student days on he was a regular contributor to the left press, and remained most of his life an active member of the French cooperative movement. He founded and for many years helped run a consumer co-op in Paris; and was often sent on missions to make contact with the movement in other countries (for which purpose he spent time in Russia after the revolution). Mauss was not a Marxist, though. His socialism was more in the tradition of Robert Owen or Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: He considered Communists and Social Democrats to be equally misguided in believing that society could be transformed primarily through government action. Rather, the role of government, he felt, was to provide the legal framework for a socialism that had to be built from the ground up, by creating alternative institutions.

I had never thought of The Gift in light of the Russian revolution, but Graeber says that “Mauss’ essay on ‘the gift’ was, more than anything, his response to events in Russia”:

particularly Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921, which abandoned earlier attempts to abolish commerce. If the market could not simply be legislated away, even in Russia, probably the least monetarized European society, then clearly, Mauss concluded, revolutionaries were going to have to start thinking a lot more seriously about what this “market” actually was, where it came from, and what a viable alternative to it might actually be like. It was time to bring the results of historical and ethnographic research to bear.

Even more interesting, and news to me (but, I’m sure, not to many of our readers) is the revival of of Mauss’ ideas in France since the mid-90s, led by the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, or MAUSS, whose journal is called: La Revue du M.A.U.S.S.. Graeber ponders whether they are merely social democrats in a new disguise or something more radical “than anything else now on the intellectual horizon,” strongly suggesting the latter. Since I’ve let my French slide over the years (it was never very good to begin with) I’ll leave that question open to our readers. Instead, I’d like to move on to the second article, by Keith Hart….

Hart (who is more active on Twitter than many younger anthropologists) discusses Marcel Fournier’s biography of Mauss and Lygia Sigaud’s essay “The vicissitudes of The Gift” which traces the history of how “The Gift” has been used by other anthropologists. Hart summarizes the central arguments of both works quite well, so I won’t do it here. Instead, I will just share a couple of choice quotes, such as this one about Fournier’s biography:

readers of this book would be excused for wondering what Mauss’s methods actually were. Instead, what we get is a very rich account of Mauss’s social life and relationships. This balance is appropriate, since the protagonist occasionally expressed doubts about the intellectual life and his uncle for one sometimes wondered if he was more suited to café society than to hard academic work.

And this one in regard’s to Sigaud’s essay:

She argues that the essay became famous only in the second half of the last century and then in a distorted version that privileged economic exchange to the detriment of Mauss’s other concerns. The chief culprit is Lévi-Strauss whose introduction to the collected essays was designed to harness Mauss’s reputation to his own theory of reciprocity as previously published in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. But The Gift really took off as a staple of Anglophone anthropological discourse following Sahlins article, “The spirit of the gift”, which entrenched Lévi-Strauss’s claim that Mauss’s essay hinged on a faulty understanding of the Maori concept of hau. She notes that the opposition between “commodity economy” (the West) and “gift economy” (the Rest) began to take root after 1980; and she identifies this trend with Carrier (1995) who sought to subvert it, while characterizing the dichotomy as “Maussian Occidentalism.” We could add that this is the period of neo-liberalism.

Having first been exposed to Mauss’ ideas in a high school anthropology course, for which I still remember interviewing my family members about their gift-giving practices, I think I never took him as seriously as I should have (although he seems not to have taken things very seriously himself). Having come across these two pieces I feel inspired to give Mauss another look.

UPDATE: I had forgotten the link to the second article. Fixed.

Time-Life has teamed up with Google to archive their images online. Browsing around I found this gem, a picture of “Anthropologist Franz Boas” from the cover of Time in 1936 (When he was 78). The caption reads: “He translated the world’s gestures.”

UPDATE: Link to article text. (Thanks to raggedrobin!) Here’s a snippet (emphasis added):

Franz Boas got into anthropology 53 years ago. He has invaded almost every branch of this science: linguistics, primitive mentality, folklore, ethnology, growth and senility, the physical effects of environment. He reminds his colleagues of the oldtime family doctor who did everything from delivering babies to pulling teeth.

The truth of the matter is that the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance. It can only be discovered a posteriori by ethnographic investigation, that is, by experience.

The Savage Mind 58

Moreover, the “ethnographer cannot interpret myths and rites correctly, even if the interpretation is a structural one … without an exact identification of the plants and animals which are referred to or of such of their remains as are directly used.” (p. 46)

My French isn’t very good, but I have an interest in this topic as part of the pre-history for British colonial ethnography in South Asia. If you know anything about this journal, or its founder, Alexandre Lacassagne, please share in the comments.

In order to understand what myth really is, must we choose between platitude and sophism?  Some claim that human societies merely express, through their mythology, fundamental feelings common to the whole of mankind, such as love, hate, or revenge or that they try to provide some kind of explanations for phenomena which they cannot otherwise understand–astronomical, meteorological, and the like.  But why should the societies do it in such elaborate and devious ways, when all of them are also acquainted with empirical explanations?

Structural Anthropology, 203

I do not postulate a kind of pre-existent harmony between the different levels of structure. They may be – and often are – completely contradictory, but the modes of contradiction all belong the same type. Indeed, according to dialectic materialism it should always be possible to proceed, by transformation, from economic or social structure to the structure of law, art, or religion. But Marx never claimed that there was only one type of transformation – for example, that ideology was simply a “mirror image” of social relations. In his view, these transformations were dialectic, and in some cases he went to great lengths to discover the crucial transformation which at first sight seemed to defy analysis.

From Structural Anthropology, pp. 329-330.

“Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,
Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison,
Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sédentaires.

Amis de la science et de la volupté
Ils cherchent le silence et l’horreur des ténèbres;
L’Erèbe les eût pris pour ses coursiers funèbres,
S’ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierté.

Ils prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes
Des grands sphinx allongés au fond des solitudes,
Qui semblent s’endormir dans un rêve sans fin;

Leurs reins féconds sont pleins d’étincelles magiques,
Et des parcelles d’or, ainsi qu’un sable fin,
Etoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques.

— Charles Baudelaire”, see also

Who is Levi-Strauss to anthropologists today? In my experience students regard him with a mixture of awe and horror, amazed at his ability to channel massive amounts of intellectual energy into brain-twistingly complex analyses that seem, to them, radically removed from anything that matters. Even those of us who think of him as an important figure also think of him as a historic one. Can anthropologists who received their Ph.D.s after, say, 1980, boil with anger when Levi-Strauss sees women as tokens to be exchanged by men, or thrill at the way that his analyses of myth open new horizons for analysis? Could it be that hommage is just another way of saying that this work does not particularly matter to us any more?

I’m particularly worried by the American tendency to fetishize French thinkers — do we find Levi-Strauss fascinating just _because_ he is old and kooky and French? Of course the French have been busy fetishizing him themselves — in Paris this summer LS’s upcoming birthday was covered in magazines and newspapers, and a new edition of his biography appeared in paper.

I don’t doubt that Levi-Strauss should be remember and celebtrated, even if celebration brings debate (I like debate, you may have noticed!). But I’m not quite sure, yet, what it would mean to celebrate the Levi-Strauss centenary. Are you?

I hate traveling and explorers . . . The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side.  The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when they have been separated from this dross.

From Tristes Tropiques, 1961 [1955].

May an inconstant disciple dedicate this book which appears in 1958, the year of Émile Durkheim’s centenary, to the memory of the founder of Année Sociologique:  that famed workshop where modern anthropology fashioned part of its tools and which we have abandoned, not so much out of disloyalty as out of the sad conviction that the task would prove too much for us.

Epigraph, Structural Anthropology

Totemism is like hysteria, in that once we are persuaded that it is possible to arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and group them together as diagnostic signs of an illness, or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation.  In the case of grand hysteria, the change is sometimes explained as an effect of a social evolution which has displaced the symbolic expression of mental troubles from the somatic to the psychic sphere.  But the comparison with totemism suggests a relation of another order between scientific theories and culture, one in which the mind of the scholar himself plays as large a part as the minds of the people studied; it is as if he were seeking, consciously or unconsciously, and under the guise of scientific objectivity, to make the latter—whether patients or so-called “primitives”—more different than they really are

From Totemism, (trans. Rodney Needham), p. 1