Tag Archives: History of Anthropology

Anthropological Ancestors

Clicking through the links on a recent NeuroAnthropology post about the open access archives of the Cambridge anthropology department, I found Alan Macfarlane’s Anthropological Ancestors website.

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.

La Revue du M.A.U.S.S.

A little over a year ago I linked to a few pieces which explored Durkheim’s vision of “communism.” I’d like to follow that up with two pieces I found recently which touch on the socialist leanings of his nephew, Mauss . Both are by professors at Goldsmiths, in London. The first, published in In These Times, is by David Graeber, and deals directly with Mauss’ politics:

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.

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Anthropologist Franz Boas

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Sorry, the image “Boas” is missing.

UPDATE 10/10/14: It seems that Google has neglected this archive and it no longer works properly. Some discussion about this failure here

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.

Claude dit:

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)

l’Anthropologie Criminelle

Browsing through BoingBoing today I noticed a reference to the Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle. Looking around I discovered that the entire contents of the journal l’Anthropologie Criminelle from 1886 to 1914 have been scanned and made available online. Here is a direct link to the archives.

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.

Claude dit:

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

Claude dit…

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.

Claude dit:

“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

What would it mean to celebrate the Levi-Strauss centenary?

Here on Savage Minds we are gearing up for Levi-Strauss’s birthday. Strong has been posting LS quotes for the past few days, and we are hoping to get some high-octane people to talk about the event. All of this preparation, however, has really gotten me thinking about what it would mean to celebrate the Levi-Strauss centenary.

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?

Claude dit:

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].

Claude dit:

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

Claude dit:

only 26 days…

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

Claude dit:

All games are defined by a set of rules which in practice allow the playing of any number of matches.  Ritual, which is also ‘played,’ is on the other hand, like the favoured instance of a game, remembered from among the possible ones becuse it is the only one which results in a particular type of equilibrium between the two sides.  The transposition is readily seen in the case of the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea who have learnt football but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary for both sides to reach the same score (Read, p. 429).  This is treating a game as a ritual.

The Savage Mind, see also, cf.

Claude dit: cent pensées sauvages

{First in an occasional series celebrating 100 years of Claude Lévi-Strauss, born 28 November 1908.}

Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society.  But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature.  A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals.  It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation.

‘Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology’