Modern Cultural Anthropology Research Articles

Michel de Montaigne's Contributions to Cultural Anthropology

Modern cultural anthropology was not established until the 19th century. But some of the basic questions in cultural anthropology about man and culture were discussed by the precursors of the field. Questions such aswhy peoples and their cultures are different and how these differences should be dealt with. In this article the author posits that Michel de Montaigne has made significant contributions to the questions and the notions of man and culture in cultural anthropology. Drawing on Montaigne’s major essays “Of Experience,” “Of Customs,” “Of Coaches,” and “Of Cannibals,” the author demonstrates that Montaigne is a strong believer in understanding and evaluating an individual culture in its own context. His beliefs are grounded in his epistemological skepticism and his views of reason, experience, difference, resemblance, customs, man, culture, and nature. Expanding the discussion of Montaigne’s concepts of man and culture in the context of some relevant cultural approaches in modern cultural anthropology, the author argues that Montaigne may be well associated with the cultural pluralist approach in anthropology.

The Russian Officer Corps and Military Efficiency, 1800–1914

Dmitrii Nikolaevich Kopelev, Na sluzhbe Imperii: Nemtsy i Rossiiskii flot v pervoipolovine XIX veka (Serving the Empire: Germans and the Russian Fleet in the First Half of the 19th Century). 338 pp. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5943800962. Gudrun Persson, Learning from Foreign Wars: Russian Military Thinking, 1859-1873. iv + 208 pp. Solihull, UK: Helion, 2010. ISBN-13 978-1906033613. 25.00 [pounds sterling]. John W. Steinberg, All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914. xvii + 384 pp. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0801895456. $60.00. It is widely acknowledged that war is a continuation of politics other means, to borrow one of Carl Clausewitz's well-known sayings. Recent developments, such as changes in the Russian political environment, together with anniversaries and commemorations of past great wars, including the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, have helped revive interest in such politics by other means. Still, Russian military history--when judged against the overwhelming proportion of the research devoted to varied political, social, and cultural issues--has been extremely unfashionable among Russian and Western scholars for decades. (1) Now it is regaining its positions. The three books under review here mark this emerging shift in historiography. The authors examine the Russian army--and furthermore address the issue of military professionalism, more specifically its origin and functioning. The book Dmitrii Kopelev, a scholar known for his works on pirates of the 16th-18th centuries, takes on a rather conventional topic for early modern Russian military history: the German officer corps in the early 19th-century Russian navy. (2) However, this is not yet another attempt to rethink the degree of foreign influence on Russia's domestic development. Nor is it just an echo of the old debates about foreign domination (zasil'e) in Russian governmental structures. Rather, Kopelev's book reaches toward modern cultural anthropology in an attempt to gain an understanding of the Russian self observing the other. Kopelev focuses on German professional and family clans in the Russian navy and demonstrates that the idea of German domination was not a stereotype. According to his analysis, German origin truly did provide certain social and career advantages for naval officers who achieved the highest ranks more often and faster than Russians through nepotism and a patronage system that Kopelev defines as networks of trust (seti doveriia). It was a well-built scheme of integration based on sophisticated family networks, the widespread support of the German community and particular marital strategies. The system ultimately created influential circles that involved navy commanders and members of the imperial court. Kopelev draws on specific cases such as the admirals Ivan Krusenstern and Fedor Litke to show that even such outstanding naval careers were not based entirely on exceptional merits and personal abilities. Kopelev places great emphasis on the methods of social integration, such as education at the Naval Cadet Corps (Morskoi kadetskii korpus) in Kronstadt. He explores patterns of assimilation, such as name changes, Russian-language usage, and conversion to Orthodoxy. It was common for people of German origin to alter their names according to Russian standards. In Russian service, Adam Johann von Krusenstern became Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenstern, Friedrich Benjamin Liitke adopted the name Fedor Petrovich Litke, and Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen came to be known as Faddei Faddeevich Bellinsgauzen. The religious identities of these naval officers of German origin varied; for example, in 1828 nearly a third of ethnic German officers were Orthodox. Despite their social and professional unity, German seamen in Russian service were not a fully homogeneous group but formed a complex intermixing community. …

Anthropology and Anthropophagy inThe Faerie Queene

The foundations of modern cultural anthropology were laid in the sixteenth century, when European scholars began to shape older forms of comparative ethnology into a new theory of world history. Fo...

The Siberian Frontier between “White Mission” and “Yellow Peril,” 1890s–1920s

The Russian conquest of Siberia was not only a remarkable event in world history like the conquest of the New World by the Western European nations, but also a decisive step in Russia's empire-building. Through territorial enlargement the empire became multiethnic. This process resembled the expansion of the white settlers in North America. Like North America, Siberia represented an “open frontier.” Harsh nature and the encounter between the white settlers and the “savages” formed the identity of the frontier. From the perspective of modern cultural anthropology the frontier also shaped reflections on the self and the other. There existed, however, a decisive difference to the American frontier: Siberia became a meeting ground for Russian and Asian cultures. Whereas the American frontier—except in the encounter with Mexico—remained isolated, Russians early came in contact with Asian nations. From the early emergence of a modern state in Russia during the era of Enlightenment, Russia came into manifold contacts with “civilized” Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) and with “uncivilized” Asians, i.e. the tribes of Siberia. At the junction between Europe and Asia, Russia as a Eurasian empire was the sole country in Europe which was so near to Asia. It was therefore logical that Russia felt a kind of mission toward Asia and required the role of a mediator between Europe and Asia.

Theoretical Currents in Late Modern Cultural Anthropology

—ABSTRACT— Over the last decade, new ways of critically exploring culture and representation have energized and fragmented cultural anthropology. Can the range of perspectives influenced by these developments have a productive relationship with objectivist traditions of anthropological scholarship and ethnography? The present paper suggests how and why this question should be affirmatively answered.

Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork.

History of Anthropology is a new series of annual volumes, each of which will treat an important theme in the history of anthropological inquiry. For this initial volume, the editors have chosen to focus on the modern cultural anthropology: intensive fieldwork by participant observation. Observers Observed includes essays by a distinguished group of historians and anthropologists covering major episodes in the history of ethnographic fieldwork in the American, British, and French traditions since 1880. As the first work to investigate the development of modern fieldwork in a serious historical way, this collection will be of great interest and value to anthropologist, historians of science and the social sciences, and the general readers interested in the way in which modern anthropologists have perceived and described the cultures of others. Included in this volume are the contributions of Homer G. Barnett, University of Oregon; James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz; Douglas Cole, Simon Frazer University; Richard Handler, Lake Forest College; Curtis Hinsley, Colgate University; Joan Larcom, Mount Holyoke College; Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley; and the editor.

Fieldworkers and Research Subjects: Who Needs Protection?

I n the fifth century B.C., Herodotus traveled far afield from his native Greece and encountered people with strange and different customs. A careful observer, he wrote detailed descriptions of their environment and physical appearance, their language, laws, marriage and divorce rules, religion, war customs, and government. Herodotus has often been called the father of history; he was, in addition, probably the first anthropological fieldworker. From Herodotus' time on, travelers, explorers, missionaries, merchants, and natural historians described the cultures of the world. Inadequate though they were, these reports helped stimulate in the eighteenth century the social reflections of Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those of Marx, Freud, and Durkheim. Bronislaw Malinowski, who lived among the Trobriand Islanders in World War I, established fieldwork as the principal research methodology of modern cultural anthropology. Often called participant observation, this method involves gathering data by firsthand observation; fieldworkers live among the people they are studying and participate