Anthropologists and Their Traditions across National Borders

Abstract

In the introduction to this eighth volume of the Histories of Anthropology Annual series, the editors emphasize that it is not the goal of this series to provide thematically coherent volumes, but that this particular example “integrates fairly easily around how anthropologists’ careers have intersected across different professional generations and allowed them to navigate national boundaries and national traditions” (ix). I beg to disagree with this assessment—national borders and specific national anthropological histories are a feature of only a few of the articles compiled here. Instead, the articles in this book can be roughly divided into two groups—the first five largely probe overlooked events and figures from the early twentieth century in the context of their significance for the emerging meaning and politics of anthropology, mostly involving uncovered archival materials, while the next four offer a reexamination of central anthropological thinkers in light of new perspectives or applications.The most fascinating chapter comes right at the start, as Laurel Kendall uses the archives of Boas’s correspondence to tell the story of Berthold Laufer’s expedition to China from 1901 to 1903, which was organized by Boas after a major fundraising effort, to generate respect for China and inform his donors of the commercial possibilities it offered. The ultimate failure of this mission, as played out through Laufer’s complaints and Boas’s nagging letters, displays the limits and paradoxes of the collecting and cataloguing “expeditionist” anthropology of the period, but it also offers what Kendall calls a “spectral counterhistory” (32) of what American anthropology could have become if it had escaped the “savage slot” and engaged “countries with histories” (2).Marc Lamont and Ian Campbell also use archives to reinterpret the functionalist giants Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, respectively, as deeply invested in promoting anthropology in ways that demonstrated its usefulness for managing the tensions of colonial society— Malinowski through his public crusade to rebrand functionalist anthropology as the “lead arbiter to the native question” and the emerging “world race problem” (75), and Radcliffe-Brown through his consistent (and ultimately failed) efforts to get support for the anthropological training of government officials in South Africa and Australia.These three articles, the most interesting in the book, refute any narrative of inevitability in the history of anthropology or any heroic story of innovative “great men.” We see Boas, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown as deeply entwined with their milieus while struggling as best they can to act effectively within them. Their fame, successes, and failures come across as contingent and dependent on both national and international politics and the micropolitics of personality. The same cannot be said for Laughlin’s strangely hagiographic piece, the goal of which is not to situate A. M. Hocart in history, but to argue not particularly effectively in the purplest of prose that Hocart, and only Hocart, is “timeless” (63).The articles by Asch and Rodseth, which stand out among the selections of the second half of the book, also address agency, but in a different way, by drawing out the ways in which Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins can be seen as giving more credit to human agency than is often supposed. Asch, drawing on his graduate school notes, discovers how Lévi-Strauss, in minor works that are not often read, allows for the consciously created solutions—refuting a stereotyped image of structuralism as essentially opposed to any sense of agency or history. Similarly, Regnall attempts to reconcile aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s and Boas’s perspectives.While uneven, the best articles in this volume force us to reexamine the standard ways we have come to think and teach about anthropological history—especially for Boas, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, and Lévi-Strauss.