Speaking with the DeadThe Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918-1970. Jack GoodyAfter Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951. George W. Stocking, Jr.

Abstract

In 1965, George Stocking cast a critical eye on histories of human sciences-efforts understand past for sake of present-works of sort practitioners in these disciplines have been wont to produce. He seemed to be taking a stance common among historians of science, insisting that historians' accounts superior to those of scientists: presentist histories prone to anachronism, distortion, misinterpretation, misleading analogy, neglect of content, oversimplification of process. But he argued that historians of human sciences ought not to be uncompromising historicists. Unlike natural scientists, contemporary social scientists were in many instances asking [their predecessors'] questions and offering answers about problems which have by no means been closed. They could learn from their history-but only if they learned to contextualize past ideas. Reading works of nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropologist E. B. Tylor (1832-1917), say, they should distinguish among the questions he asked which have long since been answered, questions which are still open, and questions which we would no longer even recognize as such-such as how active a role God has played in human progress, a vital issue in Tylor's day.1 Stocking's 1965 programmatic statement forecast his unique position among historians of human sciences, for whom his scholarship has set a nearly unprecedented intellectual standard. With After Tylor, which continues story he told in Victorian Anthropology (1987), Stocking has realized his research program on a large scale, providing both resources for historians whose substantive interests are very different from his and a usable past for anthropologists. After Tylor, in particular, plays upon motifs that appear frequently in histories of science: establishment of social anthropology in universities, after which amateur enthusiasts no longer figured in its deliberations; role of financial patrons in facilitating institutionalization of field, in shaping its prestige hierarchy and directing its selection of research problems-notwithstanding scientists' capacity to subvert their patrons' purposes; fetishization of fieldwork that became common in many en-