THEORIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY: AN INTIMATE LEARNING WITH THE 'OTHER'

Anthropology is a discipline very conscious of its history, and Alan Barnard has written a clear, balanced, and judicious textbook that surveys the historical contexts of the great debates in the discipline, tracing the genealogies of theories and schools of thought and considering the problems involved in assessing these theories. The book covers the precursors of anthropology; evolutionism in all its guises; diVusionism and culture area theories, functionalism and structuralfunctionalism; action-centred theories; processual and Marxist perspectives; the many faces of relativism, structuralism and post-structuralism; and recent interpretive and postmodernist viewpoints.

CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES, 2015

It is a necked reality that theory is the core of anthropology. Theories determine the types of questions anthropologists ask and the sorts of information they collect. Without a solid understanding of the history of theory, anthropological data remain a collection of ‘exotic ethnographic vignettes’. With knowledge of theory, these vignettes become attempts to answer critical philosophical and practical problems. Thus, it is critical that anthropologists understand the theory and its historical context. Students face two choices, then, if they wish to understand the theoretical perspectives that ultimately drive ethnographic fieldwork: They can read classic theoretical articles or they can read someone's interpretations of those articles. For readers who are not well versed in anthropological theory, neither choice is ideal. As a professional discipline anthropology is a subject in which theory is of great importance. It is also a subject in which theory is closely bound up with practice. Anthropological theory may be compared to a large crossroads with busy traffic and a few, temporarily employed traffic policemen who desperately try to force the unruly traffic to follow the rules. (There are, it must be admitted, a number of minor crashes and other accidents almost every day.) Or it could be described, more harmoniously, as a coral reef, where the living corals literally build upon the achievements of their deceased predecessors. Put differently; during the approximately 100 years that have passed since modern anthropology was established in the USA, Britain and France, many general theories have been proposed, become fashionable in and sometimes outside of anthropology, have been fiercely debated and challenged, and have disappeared, often almost without leaving visible traces.

Anthropological Forum, 2019

2001

Series Preface vii Preface to the Second Edition viii Preface to the First Edition ix 1. Proto-Anthropology 1 Herodotus and other Greeks 1; After Antiquity 3; The European conquests and their impact 6; Why all this is not quite anthropology yet 10; The Enlightenment 11; Romanticism 15 2. Victorians, Germans and a Frenchman 20 Evolutionism and cultural history 21; Morgan 23; Marx 25; Bastian and the German tradition 27; Tylor and other Victorians 29; The Golden Bough and the Torres expedition 32; German diffusionism 35; The new sociology 38; Durkheim 39; Weber 41 3. Four Founding Fathers 46 The founding fathers and their projects 49; Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders 52; Radcliffe-Brown and the 'natural science of society' 55; Boas and historical particularism 58; Mauss and the total social prestation 61; Anthropology in 1930: parallels and divergences 64 4. Expansion and Institutionalisation 68 A marginal discipline? 69; Oxford and the LSE, Columbia and Chicago 72; The Dakar-Djibouti expedition 74; Culture and personality 77; Cultural history 80; Ethnolinguistics 82; The Chicago school 83; 'Kinshipology' 86; Functionalism's last stand 90; Some British outsiders 92 5. Forms of Change 96 Neo-evolutionism and cultural ecology 99; Formalism and substantivism 104; The Manchester school 107; Methodological individualists at Cambridge 112; Role analysis and system theory 117 6. The Power of Symbols 120 From function to meaning 121; Ethnoscience and symbolic anthropology 125; Geertz and Schneider 127; Lévi-Strauss and structuralism 130; Early impact 133; The state of the art in 1968 135 vi A History of AntHropology 7. Questioning Authority 138 The return of Marx 139; Structural Marxism 141; The not-quite-Marxists 145; Political economy and the capitalist world system 147; Feminism and the birth of reflexive fieldwork 151; Ethnicity 155; Practice theory 158; The sociobiology debate and Samoa 161 8. The End of Modernism? 166 The end of modernism? 171; The postcolonial world 176; A new departure or a return to Boas? 179; Other positions 184 9. Global Networks 192 Towards an international anthropology? 194; Trends for the future 200; Biology and culture 203; Globalisation and the production of locality 211 Bibliography 221 Index 239

Social Dynamics, 1998

As we approach• the millenniumn the discipline of anthropology occupies a hiighly contested terrain, a battle-ground on which scientistic, humanistic, political-economic, anld postmodern agendas are puttinlg forth conficting claimns anid vying for hegemony (Lee 1992).,Onie readinig of anithropology is that it is a part of the discredited canon conlstructed by dead white males, architects and apologists for capitalismn and imiperialism. But despite the vogue fo'r anthropology-bashing • in some circles, I believe that quite differenlt r•eadigs are possibl: and I would like to present onie here. Anthropology's br•ief history as a discipline has beenl marked by both successes and failures. It is commiionplace to say it is a discipline in crisis; but on•e could argue thiat thiis has beenl true of its enltire history. Whiat I would like to do is give you a personal view of some of its strenigth~s and weaknesses; wher•e the disciplinie has come fromT and where it is goinlg. If I have anything to add to the usual rumninations on this subject it is thiat I feel that anthropology's politics are as muchi a part of its histo'ry and future as is its bodies of method, theory, anld knowledge. The paper will draw examples from anthropology generally but the ma7in line of marchi is to use a broad overview of th~e crisis and tranisformnation in anthropology as a point of departure to examine aspects of South• African society in the first post-Apartheid years. Regarding the disciplinie as a whole mny thesis is this: anthropology is un•dergoing a tranlsformnation that is pregniant with possibilities, but to paraphrase Gramnsci: whenever the old order is dyinlg anid the new struggling

Phone: +393312987889 COURSE DESCRIPTION: The course examines key theoretical concepts and approaches in classic and contemporary anthropology, following two parallel paths: the first follows on the history of the discipline and explores the development of the French, British and American schools of anthropology; while the second, is thematic and examines key themes and debates in anthropology, namely on the unity of mankind, cultural relativism, myth and ritual, structure and function, culture and history, meaning and power. These parallel reflections both start from questioning what anthropology is, and has been, and interrogating its canon and the project of decolonizing anthropology. The course is designed to provide students with knowledge of different traditions in anthropology as well as with a critical perspective on the creative process of theory-building.

Anthropological Theory, vol. 8, n° 4, 2008, pp. 345-356.

Any anthropological research mobilizes an axiological system, composed at once of moral values and epistemological values. Starting from the example of my first fieldwork among officers of the secret political police in Poland under marshal law in 1982-3, and subsequently examining several types of moral agendas in anthropology (as a science of moral reform in E.B. Tylor; as a salutary revelation of social mechanics in E. Durkheim; as a lesson of ethics in C. Lévi-Strauss; as an expedient for raising the moral standard of colonial action in M. Delafosse; 'applied anthropology' as a science useful in the struggle against totalitarian regimes during the Second World War and the Cold War; as cultural criticism in 1970-1980; 'moral anthropology' as a way of defending the rights of the oppressed in the 1990s), I stress some potentially negative consequences of moral stances in anthropology, insofar as values of ethical commitment may come into conflict with epistemological values. In conclusion, I plead for an anthropology able to objectify its own moral agenda and to grasp its epistemological impact on scholarly representations we aspire to produce.

2003

Anthropological Quarterly, 2002

I n the early 1920s, the critical theorist Georg Lukacs published a stinging indictment of what he understood to be the impasse of capitalist modernity.

INCAA, 2023

Anthropology has always claimed to be a people’s science. It is a field science as it follows field methodology that facilitates the anthropological researcher to become immersed in the field with the aim to unravel the mysteries and meanings of human behavior within the respective cultural boundaries, which may be different from one’s own culture or the same as that of the researcher with varying degrees. In the process, they have to uphold the value of science on the one hand, even while they have to be mindful of the interests and concerns of the people concerned, on the other. These dual responsibilities create a lot of challenges and dilemmas in the practice of Anthropology. Thus, there has been concerns raised throughout its history of more than a century, with regard to the ethics of fieldwork and in the practice of Anthropology vis-à-vis the interests of the people concerned. The present paper takes a deep look into the issue of ethics involved in Anthropological researches and identifies the ethical concerns, dilemmas and challenges in the practice of Anthropology.