This article examines the history of ethnological studies conducted by the missionaries of Africa ('White Fathers') in Northern Zambia, situating their work within the broader context of British colonial social anthropology. It explores the relationship between missionary ethnographic practices and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, a government anthropological institute established in 1938. The White Fathers' studies of African customs formed part of a broader process of their agendas to 'modernise' and Christianise African populations. Christianisation was a modernising project, in relation to how missionaries framed their work as bringing 'modernity' to colonised societies, often defined in terms of Western ideas of progress, development, and civilisation. This idea was central to the ideology of empire, especially from the 19th century onwards, and had both material and discursive dimensions. This work and the processes of enculturation, processes of adapting Christian beliefs to local customs, paralleled the indirect rule system. In this paper, I argue that the White Fathers' close engagement with Bemba cultural practices and material culture contributed to the ethnologisation of Bemba identity, reinforcing tribal distinctions and elevating Bemba prominence over other ethnic groups. These studies not only shaped colonial knowledge production but also played a role in transforming indigenous subjectivities, positioning local populations as governable Christian citizens. By interrogating the entanglements between missionary ethnography and colonial anthropology, this article sheds light on the intersections of Christianisation, knowledge, power, and colonialism in colonial Zambia, and seeks to contribute to wider scholarship on missionaries as ethnographic agents in colonial Africa.

The work of the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún is widely recognized in the field of anthropology, primarily due to his methodological contributions. The research techniques he employed—such as learning the native language, placing emphasis on linguistic aspects to understand the culture and worldview of “the others”, carefully selecting informants from all social strata, and designing open-ended questionnaires—seem more akin to those of modern British social anthropology than to practices from 500 years ago. In 2015, his work was designated as part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program, an acknowledgment aimed at highlighting his cultural contributions and preserving the world’s documentary heritage as a symbol of humanity’s collective memory. This designation has renewed Sahagún’s prominence as a precursor of this discipline. This study explores the impact of such recognition and the enduring value of his work. In a time like the present, where interethnic tensions and rejection of difference are on the rise, Sahagún’s work stands as an unquestionable legacy against intolerance and ethnocentrism.

Since 1980 there has been an open discussion on the hostility that anthropologists typically have for missionaries. A consensus in this conversation has been that anthropologists dislike missionaries because they are engaged in cultural imperialism. This article, however, explores another hidden factor: the professionalization aspirations of those self-identifying with anthropology as a discipline which created a strong desire to eliminate missionaries as potential rivals. Missionaries indisputably acquired a deep knowledge of indigenous languages and cultures which made it all the more important to dismiss them as biased amateurs lest they should be accepted as competing experts. This dynamic is documented and explored across the twentieth century in the context of British social anthropologists. One particularly telling example is evolving critiques of missionaries in regards to fieldwork as the practice of anthropologists themselves changed in this regard from armchair anthropology, through survey work, to intensive participant observation.

Response to Timothy Larsen’s “British Social Anthropologists and Missionaries in the Twentieth Century”

Response to Timothy Larsen, “British Social Anthropologists and Missionaries in the Twentieth Century”

This article problematises similarities in social responses to two different types of prevention - antiretrovirals in the form of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV transmission, and the emerging COVID-19 vaccines against the SARS-COV2 virus. For the purpose of this article, I have revisited the work of Mary Douglas, British social anthropologist (1921-2007) on risk and social responses to risk. In the late 1980s, Mary Douglas described patterns and modalities of social response to risk in emerging epidemics. The same pattern of social dynamics and response could be followed in relation to two pandemics of the 21st century - first, an HIV pandemic that started in the early 80s and in which prevention breakthrough occurred in 2012 with the introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis - PrEP; and second, the COVID-19 pandemic that started in early 2020 with newly developed vaccines in 2021 as public health response to it.

Familiar accounts of the intellectual origins of performance theory downplay the ideas inherited from Durkheimian and Marxian social theory by way of British social anthropology. Structural functionalism as taught by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and the Marx-inflected social anthropology of Max Gluckman are key but underappreciated junctures between classical social theory and performance theory. This lineage helps explain the ongoing tension in performance theory regarding the role embodied communicative action plays in maintaining or altering social order. It also casts new light on the use of the language of “action” and “event” to describe performance phenomena.

Pnina Werbner was a British social anthropologist, a brilliant thinker and an engaged intellectual renowned for her prolific contributions to debates on Sufi Islam, multiculturalism and diaspora, as well as urban and legal anthropology. In January 2023, she died unexpectedly during a holiday with her husband, the anthropologist Richard Werbner.

Most of the secondary literature on the former Soviet Bloc and communism maintains that the postwar period brought about radical change compared to the interwar period.Family, Taboo and Communism in Poland, however, takes a different position.Focusing on a single aspect of social history, it proposes that the continuity of the traditional family model was prevalent, despite the modernizing endeavors imported from the Soviet Union.This volume is the English translation of Barbara Klich-Kluczewska's habilitation thesis "Rodzina, tabu i komunizm w Polsce ," 1 in which she explored the concepts of family and taboo in a more comprehensive sense and their intersections, for instance in cases of unmarried mothers, divorce, family violence, and abortion in communist Poland.Based on archival materials (court and police files), private sources (letters, life writings), popular culture (films), and an examination of secondary sources (mainly scholarship in sociology), Klich-Kluczewska concentrates on the institutions and psychology of social control and the subjective perspectives of "lived history." Ioffer here a brief summary of this important volume on the history of the Polish family, which challenges the discontinuity narrative concerning communist societies by focusing on under-researched taboo subjects, such as single motherhood, divorce, domestic violence, and abortion.Using the methodology of "anthropological history" 2 in the first chapter, Klich-Kluczewska follows the evolution of taboo concepts and argues for a modernized interpretation based on the works of twentieth-century British social anthropologists (Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Mary Douglas) as a research category and an informational tool for "socially designating what does not fall in the line with the prevailing structure" (p.18).Taboo is understood as a consensus and a means of organizing social order via the examination of public discourses.It can be an indicator of social change or the lack of social change.However, the observed phenomena can scarcely be taken as taboos in the sense of something that needs to be silenced.Rather, they were seen simply as immoral or socially

This paper endeavours to take stock of academic writing not merely as an activity that precedes publishing but as an art and a craft in its own right. We also draw attention to some of the conditions that affect writing in academia today, notably second language userhood in the production of text. In order to do that, we invoke the reasoning of British social anthropologist Tim Ingold, particularly his perspective on dwelling, skill, and the education of attention. From this emerges a view of academic writing as a practice founded in skill, developed through the dweller’s practical involvement with his or her everyday tasks and influenced by different constraints. Because no one is born a skilled writer, attentive dwelling lies at the core of the writer’s education of attention as a situated mode of perceptual engagement with the environments in which he or she dwells, be it through reading, co-authorship or textual response.

ABSTRACT While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to “map the margins” (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ.

In a classic study of Nuer religion, British Social Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard explored the problem of religious symbols embedded in the Nuer metaphor ‘twins are birds’. In this paper we present a study concluding that not twins but mermaids are birds. At least this is how they semantically behave in the lexical habitat of the influential Danish romanticist and nineteenth-century poet, pastor, and politician N.F.S. Grundtvig (178 3-1872). As in the Nuer case the cause for this behavior is to be found in the symbolic structures of a religious logic. The study consists of word embeddings plotting the bestiary arising from Grundtvig’s 1068 publications in their tokenized, lemmatized, ‘algorithmifyed’ avatar. Our interest here lies with exploring how non-human animals are displayed in a material that have left a dual cultural and religious imprint in Denmark. Anticipating the conclusion: pigs are food; mermaids are birds.

E. Durkheim’s concept of sacredness as formulated in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life aims at explaining why and how an aggregate of people becomes ‘a single whole’ and reproduces itself. This concept is the logical foundation of Durkheim’s ‘sociological holism’ for it focuses, according to T. Parsons, on ‘the core of the social system’. The principles of this concept are opposite to the principles of ‘methodological nominalism and individualism’ of the British social anthropology as expressed in the theory of animism. Durkheim defines the sacred as an ‘impersonal force’, impersonal ‘collective being’, ‘collective soul’ created and reproduced on the religious cults. The individual principle is reduced by Durkheim to the animal and wild which can be understood only as a part of the ‘collective being’ in primitive societies. In defining the nature of religious rituals, Durkheim relied on the concept of ritual by W. Robertson-Smith, which defines the main meaning of cults as the ‘union’ of adepts with the deity and each other. By removing the deity as a transcendental principle, Durkheim reduced the meaning of religious rituals to the reproduction of social unity, solidarity. Durkheim’s theory of sacredness, like its opposite - the theory of animism, is based on the concepts of the philosophy of the Modern Time, which determined the anthropomorphization of consciousness and confusion of terms ‘person’ and ‘individuality’. The significance of Durkheim’s concept should not be identified in the positivist perspective - as an explanation of facts unexplained by alternative theories. In such an interpretation, this concept was criticized and rejected by most scholars. However, it is important as a part of ‘social engineering’ which changed the intellectual environment, including the scientific community, in a specific, ideologically leftist direction.

Reviewed by: Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis by Sarah C. Humphreys John Ma Sarah C. Humphreys, Kinship in Ancient Athens: An Anthropological Analysis (2 Vols.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxi, 1457. $365.00. ISBN 9780199788256; 9780198788263. Some time in the 350s bce, after the death of Kallias, son of Hipponikos, his long-lost son reappeared in Athens to claim his share of the inheritance. This was a scion of scandalous birth and dubious legitimacy, and the family claimed that the returnee was not "Kallias' bastard" but an imposter, a groom who had stolen his master's identity after the latter died in war. This fourth-century Martin Guerre is one of many delights in S. C. Humphreys' latest work, the fruit of thirty-five years' research (1; the nothos is discussed on p. 215). In addition to an anthropology of kinship (vol. 1), it offers an original history of state emergence in Archaic Athens, a discourse on historical method, and (in vol. 2) an overview of corporate groups in Attica (phratries, genê) and official territorial and demographic structures (tribes, trittyes, demes). Kinship has long been a center of Humphreys' interest, reflecting engagement with the concerns of British social anthropology; comparison with the theoretical underpinnings and findings of recent French and Anglo-American work [End Page 108] on Athenian social history might prove interesting (Humphreys herself provides some comment to that effect). Her gambit is that classical learning (prosopography, legal history, epigraphy), taking the place of fieldwork in modern anthropology, can reveal the workings of Athenian kinship, a particularly well documented version of the common Greek patrilinear nuclear family. Humphreys' strategy is to look at areas of stress. The tensions surrounding adoption, guardianship, marriage with kin, and intra-family disputes offer a hair-raising casebook of family law which Humphreys tackles with gusto. What emerges is the intricate entanglement of the household as defined in family law (established in Solon's time and itself a compromise between aristocratic and folk-peasant practices), civic institutions (centered around the importance of citizen status), property, individual greed, or emotional attachments. Bargains and compromises, often struck to solve conflict, generated trouble down the line, mobilizing kinfolk in networks of support when matters went to protracted litigation. Because citizen status depended on recognition by wider groups, the shape of households was, in practice, open to renegotiation. No wonder that family conflicts were a prime subject for Attic drama, richly exploited by Humphreys alongside forensic rhetoric. The same fluidity characterized official performances of kinship. Rites de passage, funerary and dedicatory practices, festivals, politics, and warfare—these all provided the means for the community to shape the practices of kinship. For instance, public funerals for the war dead influenced private funeral commemoration. Conversely, they were themselves shaped by kinship relations. The last phenomenon is complex: the "long adolescence" (between the ages of 18 and 30) is a result of family practice (paternal power over property, late male marriage), but also a reaction against the power (and simply the tedium) of familial bonds. Why dine with your uncles when you might consort with coevals (and parasites like Sokrates)? The most official contexts for the performance of kinship were the various interlocking groups which constituted the Athenian state. After a history of the obscure pre-Kleisthenic tribes, trittyes, and other institutions (naukrariai, the "Twelve Towns" of Attica), Humphreys examines (often speculatively) the genê and the phratries, an essential but obscure part of the Kleisthenic system in deciding on status. The Kleisthenic tribes, trittyes and demes receive extensive treatment, before a four-hundred-page gazetteer-cum-prosopography for every known deme, organized by tribe. This section teems with helpful and original insights. I would single out the following: the observation that Athenian tribal-based mobilization was ill-suited to the real wars Athens waged with ad hoc contingents; the possibility that bouleutic quotas were fluid and negotiated at the local level; the prevalence of patronage and cronyism at phratry and deme level; the utopian nature of many deme decrees. Some receive extensive and illuminating treatment, such as Sphettos (near Koropi, in rich Mesogeia land and the origin of several politicians), Halai Aixonides (the site of a prolonged...

Bronisław Malinowski sought throughout his career to make a scientific contribution to understanding and reforming the international order by making analogies with ‘primitive’ societies. His ethnographic material was important to Marcel Mauss’s internationalist project in The Gift, and can still provide lessons in internationalism. This article examines Malinowski’s ethnographic figuration of ‘the evolution of primitive international law’, and documents a set of intellectual exchanges between him and Mauss. This illuminates an unexpected avenue of Durkheimian influence on British social anthropology and situates Malinowski in contemporary imperial and internationalist debates. Despite Malinowski’s early criticism of Émile Durkheim’s account of ‘collective ideas’, his later writing shows the (unacknowledged) influence of Mauss’s understandings of obligation and intersocial exchange. Unearthing the terms of this exchange between Malinowski and Mauss helps to recover the central normative lesson of the former’s final book and his ethnographic work as a whole – namely, that sovereignty should be dethroned as an organising principle of international order in favour of intersocial exchange and the obligations it produces.

This article discusses how the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and the liturgical reform in the Catholic Church enhanced critical reflexivity on ritual semiotics and the boundaries of ritualism and anti-ritualism in British social anthropology (namely, in the works of Victor Turner and Mary Douglas) and in the protest movement of Catholic Traditionalism, and furnished the conditions for their discursive convergence. Since Turner and Douglas were Catholics, the similarities in the logic and rhetoric of academic and “folk” anthropology of ritual inevitably raise questions commonly labeled as the problem of belief, focusing on the risks and benefits of the anthropologist's religious commitments for ethnographic work. A close analysis of statements on liturgical reform by British anthropologists and Traditionalist Catholics shows that they share a common, Durkheimian view of ritual and social order; at the same time, intellectual and spiritual biographies of Turner and Douglas demonstrate that sometimes anthropology can influence anthropologists' belief as much as their belief influences their anthropology. These observations provide grounds for a revision of the problem of belief with a Protestant bias. The association of belief with the inner life and creeds is one of the many ways of conceptualizing the mediation of religious experience. In some cultures, such as traditional Catholicism, no lesser emphasis is placed on ritual performance. Thus, an exploration of the proximity of anthropological and Traditionalist “languages” of ritual description opens up prospects for a discussion of the place of attitudes toward ritual in anthropological epistemology and its historical roots.

During the Second World War, the British social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was commissioned by the US Office of War Information to write a “diagnostic study” of the “Burmese Personality”. His report made a strong impression at the time but, like its author, has now been forgotten. This article looks back at that exercise, its antecedents and its impact on perceptions of the country now known as Myanmar. It also notes how Gorer’s notions of “national character”, based on his idiosyncratic interpretation of Freudian teachings, continued to exercise some influence after the war. Echoes of such ideas can be found in more recent discussions of Myanmar’s “strategic culture” and claims by successive Myanmar governments to the country’s cultural distinctiveness.

98 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2020. to a sudden halt by 1975 with the collapse of the Democratic consensus .34 This was a peculiarly American development that arrested the progress of a historically European social democratic order travelling from an originally Idealist conception of the state in the British and German 1830s to its ultimate Keynesian destination.35 What replaced it is a materialist conception of the state constituted of rotating corporate hierarchies,36 in an originally American ‘corporate liberalist’ tradition from the 1900s in which entrepreneurs actively shape the state by ‘adapting to their own ends the ideals of middle class social reformers, social workers and socialists.’37 Weber’s thought is germane to our condition which it describes as resulting from a battle of ideas where, in that context, the state has the potential to make any ends its own.38 Neoliberalism is not, per Douglass , a condition brought about by public attitudes, except trivially. It is originally a set of calculated ideas long in the making, promoted by élites to prise the grip of a European idea of the state off the body of the peculiarly, per Thorstein Veblen, ‘pecuniary’ institutions that developed in America. Progressives had conceived of the countervailing forces they brought to bear on those institutions in terms of this European idea, until the collapse of the Democratic consensus. Omar Kassem Private scholar, Sevenoaks, Kent Talcott Parsons, Kapitalismus bei Max Weber—zur Rekonstruktion eines fast vergessenen Themas, edited by Uta Gerhardt (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019), v + 167 pp. (pbk). ISBN 978-3-65810-110-7. €37.99. The centerpiece of Uta Gerhardt’s volume is a document that Talcott Parsons prepared as a dissertation for his Dr. phil. degree from 34. Henry J. Aaron, Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1978), especially p. 154. 35. David P. Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1966). 36. G. William Domhoff, State Autonomy Or Class Dominance?: Case Studies on Policy Making in America (Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 1996); G. William Domhoff et al., Studying the Power Élite (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 37. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. xiii-xiv. 38. Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State: Origins, Structure and Significance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 22. Book Reviews 99© Max Weber Studies 2020. the University of Heidelberg. However, Gerhardt introduces the dissertation with an essay that reviews Parsons’s education prior to his arrival in Heidelberg and also characterizes aspects of the intellectual environment he encountered at the university. She then adds a lengthy postscript to the dissertation that reviews the importance of Max Weber’s works for Parsons’s thought throughout his career, with particular emphasis on Parsons’s advocacy for Weber’s thesis on the importance of the ‘Protestant ethic’ for the emergence of the spirit of capitalism and the development of rationalistic modern capitalism— a career-long advocacy that began with the dissertation manuscript. It is her thesis that without Parsons’s advocacy the importance of Weber’s works, especially his analysis of the sources and origins of modern capitalism, may well never have become prominent in contemporary social science. The outline of Talcott Parsons’s early career has been fairly clear, but Gerhardt’s introduction relates part of the story with new details, supported by quotations from correspondence she has found in archives at both the University of Heidelberg and Harvard University . Parsons was an undergraduate at Amherst College, an intellectually thriving and challenging institution, where he studied biology and institutional economics and took an influential course on Kant, reading the Critique of Pure Reason. He then spent a year at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced primarily by Malinowski’s seminar in which key figures of later British social anthropology, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth, were also students. Through the support of the Amherst professor who had taught the course on Kant, Parsons then obtained a fellowship for a year’s study in Germany. He was assigned...

The essay draws on two case studies from the photographic archive of British social anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-73) on a fieldwork expedition to Kenya and South Sudan in 1936. The case studies reveal how connections can be made within an archive to articulate new narratives around often well-known photographs. The case studies explore the relationship between two different practices of looking: that involved in the act of photography, and that of looking at archival photographs as historical sources. Whilst the abundance of visual information in the archive reveals photography's endless potential for recodability, the essay argues that the photographic archive is also characterised by obscurity and limitation, and that the small dramas that are sometimes fleetingly glimpsed in the photographic hinterland will for the most part remain partial, unintelligible, and unarticulable by historians. Although there is a visual abundance in the photographic archive with which we might engage, what is shown to us is not abundantly clear. The essay argues that the important historical connections between the concepts of visibility and knowledge in a discipline such as anthropology often break down when the archive is recalcitrant, revealing its own limits as much as its bounty.

The paper deals with the concept of sacred in the French sociological school. While creating this theory, E. Durkheim and M. Mauss criticized the views of classical English anthropologists who identified cults as animistic practices. E. Durkheim invoked the concept of religion by W. Robertson Smith, developed and changed his main ideas to some extent. Further ideas of E. Durkheim and his followers were based on the theory of totemism as the original historical form of sacredness with no place for gods as supernatural persons. Another feature of the concept of sacred was the division of society into the sacred and profane spheres. It was popular with the French scientific environment, but British social anthropologists failed to accept it. The French theory of sacred was supplemented by the idea of M. Mauss about “mana” as an impersonal magical power without the need to appeal to divine, transcendent powers. The interpretation of this category by French sociologists was similar to the concept of electricity in the theory of animal magnetism. At the same time, E. Durkheim and his followers did not present the substantial distinction between the holy (ritually pure sacredness) and defiled (ritually impure sacredness) elements. Despite the fact that the theory of sacred in the French sociological school was strongly criticized by British social anthropologists, this doctrine had a considerable impact on the schools of thought in the second half of the 20th century. Nowadays, the Russian scientific community pays much attention to this concept, as evidenced by the increased number of relevant publications. However, there is little research on the relationship between the concept of sacred and the socialist ideology of French socialists.