GENERAL INTRODUCTION

THE SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropologists study people. They do not study stars, rocks, plants or the
weather. But whilst we may have little difficulty in separating out the field of
anthropological inquiry from those of astronomy, geology, botany or
meteorology, it is not so obvious howif at allanthropology may be
distinguished from the many other branches of the human sciences, all of
which could claim to be studying people in one way or another. Medicine is
concerned with the workings of the human body, psychology with those of the
mind; history studies peoples activities in the past, sociology their institutional
arrangements in the present, and so on. The list could be extended almost
indefinitely. What, then, is the distinctively anthropological way of studying
people?
Part of the difficulty we have in answering this question is attributable to the
fact that there is not one way of doing anthropology, but many. There are two
facets to this diversity, the first having to do with the circumstances of the
disciplines historical development, the second lying in its contemporary
subdisciplinary divisions. I begin with a few words about anthropologys
history.
In a sense, of course, anthropology can be traced to the earliest antiquity,
when human beings first began to speculate about their own nature, origins and
diversity. But as an explicitly defined field of academic inquiry, it is a creature
of the last two centuries of thought in that region of the world conventionally
known as the West. Western thought, however, is not a monolithic edifice but a
complex interweaving of often opposing currents, and this is no less true of the
career of anthropology. Moreover, these currents did not flow in an historical
vacuum, but at every moment responded to dominant moral, political and
economic concerns of the time. Thus British anthropology developed alongside
the growth of empire; its preoccupations were fuelled by the need of the
colonial administration to take the measure of its presumed superiority over
administered nations, and to turn a knowledge of their social organizations and
cultural traditions to the service of indirect rule. In many countries of
Continental Europe, by contrast, the growth of anthropology (more commonly

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known as ethnology) was linked to emergent nationalist movements of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the efforts, on the part of
adherents of each movement, to discover a national heritage in the traditions of
local folk or peasant culture. In North America the situation was different
again: the United States and Canada had their indigenous Indian populations,
and the first priority of many American anthropologists was to record as much
as possible about the physical features, material artefacts, languages and
cultures of extant Amerindian groups before it was too late. This was a kind of
salvage anthropology.
The second facet to the diversity of anthropological approaches lies in the
fact that anthropology, as it exists today, is not a single field, but is rather a
somewhat contingent and unstable amalgam of subfields, each encumbered
with its own history, theoretical agenda and methodological preoccupations. In
the American tradition of scholarship, it has long been customary to
distinguish four such subfields of anthropology, namely physical,
archaeological, cultural and linguistic. In the British tradition, by contrast,
there are only three subfields, of physical anthropology, archaeology and social
(rather than cultural) anthropology. The exclusion of linguistics from British
anthropology is a curious and somewhat scandalous anomaly to which I return
below. The more immediate question is: why these fields in particular? What
brought the study of physical types, ancient artefacts and supposedly
primitive ways of life under the umbrella of a single discipline of
anthropology?
Most academic disciplines and their boundaries are, in fact, the fossilized
shells of burnt-out theories, and in this, anthropology is no exception. The
theory which, more than any other, established anthropology as a
comprehensive science of humankind held that people the world over are
undergoing a gradual, evolutionary ascent from primitive origins to advanced
civilization, and that the differences between societies can be explained in terms
of the stages they have reached in this progression. Anthropology, then,
emerged as the study of human evolutionconceived in this progressive
sensethrough the reconstruction of its earlier stages. Physical anthropology
studied the evolution of human anatomy, archaeology studied the evolution of
material artefacts, and social and cultural anthropology studied the evolution of
beliefs and practiceson the assumption that the ways of life of contemporary
primitives afford a window on the former condition of the more civilized
nations.
In short, it was progressive evolutionism that unified the study of human
anatomy, artefacts and traditions as subfields of a single discipline. Yet this kind
of evolutionary theory belongs essentially to the formative period of
anthropology in the nineteenth century and is, today, almost universally
discredited. So what, if anything, still holds the sublfields together? To the
extent that contemporary anthropologists concern themselves with this
question, their opinions differ greatly. Some argue that their continued

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combination, for example within University Departments, is an anachronism

for which there is no longer any rational justification. Thus many cultural
anthropologists, concerned as they are with the manifold ways in which the
peoples among whom they have worked make sense of the world around them,
find more common ground with students of philosophy, language, literature
and the arts than with their colleagues in other fields of anthropology. Social
anthropologists, who would regard their project as a comparative study of the
generation, patterning and transformation of relationships among persons and
groups, profess a close affinityamounting almost to identityto sociologists
and historians, but have little time for archaeology (despite the obvious links
between archaeology and history). For their part, physical anthropologists (or
biological anthropologists, as many now prefer to be known) remain
committed to the project of understanding human evolution, but their
evolutionary theory is of a modern, neo-Darwinian variety, quite at odds with
the progressive evolutionism of the nineteenth century. Having vigorously
repudiated the racist doctrines of the turn of the century, which cast such a
shadow over the early history of the discipline, anthropologists of all
complexions now recognize that social and cultural variation is quite
independent of biogenetic constraint. Thus physical anthropology, cut loose
from the study of society and culture, has virtually become a subfield of
evolutionary biology, devoted specifically to the evolution of our own kind.
Yet despite these tendencies towards the fragmentation of anthropology,
along the lines of the heavily institutionalized division of academic labour
between the humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and the natural
sciences on the other, many anthropologists remain convinced that there is
more to their discipline than the sum of its parts. What is distinctive about the
anthropological perspective, they argue, is a commitment to holism, to the idea
that it should be possibleat least in principleto establish the
interconnections between the biological, social, historical and cultural
dimensions of human life that are otherwise parcelled up among different
disciplines for separate study. It was, of course, just such a synthesis that the
nineteenth century founders of anthropology claimed to have achieved with
their theory of evolution. But the fact that the theory is now judged, in
hindsight, to have been wrong does not mean that the project that gave rise to it
was entirely misconceived (although aspects of itsuch as its assumption of
Euro-American superiority and its racist undertonesundoubtedly were). My
own view, which also furnishes the rationale for the present volume, is that a
synthesis of our knowledge of the conditions of human life in the world, in all
its aspects, is something worth striving for, and that working towards such a
synthesis is the essence of doing anthropology.
The obstacles, however, are formidable. Biological and cultural
anthropologists, for example, are divided not simply by their attention to
different kinds of facts, but by a more fundamental difference in their
respective understandings of the relations between fact and theory. True, the

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data of observation in every branch of anthropology have one thing in common:

they are not derived by experiment, but are gathered through the conduct of
fieldwork. But ethnographic fieldwork, as it is carried out by social and cultural
anthropologists in the settings of everyday life, is very different from the kind
of fieldwork that might be conducted by an archaeologist or physical
anthropologist in searching, say, for the fossilized remains of early hominids or
for evidence, in the form of preserved artefacts, of their activities. Fossils and
artefacts can be treated, to all intents and purposes, as inert objects of
investigation: they may be examined for every ounce of information they will
yield, but they are not themselves party to its interpretation. Living people,
however, cannot be treated as objects in this sense. In the field, ethnographers
engage in a continuous dialogue with their informants, who provide instruction
in the skills and knowledge that are entailed in their particular form of life. It
has been said, with some justification, that ethnographers do not so much study
people, as go to study among or with people, and the results of such study
emerge as the products of this mutual, dialogic encounter. Indeed much so-
called ethnographic data is in fact autobiographical, describing the ways in
which the fieldworker experienced those events in which he or she participated.
Under these circumstances, a clear distinction between observation and
interpretation, between the collection of data in the field and their placement
within a theoretical framework, cannot readily be sustained. This did not,
however, prevent the first generation of British social anthropologists
pioneers of the kind of long-term, intensive field study that is now considered
indispensable to competent ethnographic workfrom pretending that it could,
apparently in an effort to secure recognition for their discipline as a true science
of society. This goes some way to explaining the curious neglect, by social
anthropologists of this generation, of language and its uses. Knowledge of the
native language was considered a prerequisite for ethnographic inquiry; as
such, however, it was regarded as a tool of the anthropologists trade rather
than something to be investigated in its own right. One was to use language to
probe the details of culture and social organization much as a botanist uses a
microscope to examine the fine structure of plants. Only subsequently, as
anthropologists became more reflexive, more sensitive to the epistemological
conditions of their own inquiry, did language use re-emerge as a key focus of
attention. Even in North America, where linguistic anthropology has always
occupied its place among the four subfields of the discipline, its practitioners
have long been in the minority, often drawn into the anthropological camp
through their reaction against the excessive formalism of mainstream
linguistics, and its insensitivity to the social and cultural contexts in which
language is put to work.
But the challenge posed by ethnographic study among people whose
backgrounds and sensibilities are situated in environments very different from
those of the West goes far beyond showing how the seemingly strange or
irrational makes sense when placed in its proper context. For the knowledge

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and wisdom that these people impart to the fieldworker, sharpened as it is by

their practical experience of everyday involvement in the world, strikes at the
heart of some of the most basic presuppositions of Western thought itself. To
take this knowledge seriously, and to be the wiser for it, means bringing it to
bear in a critical engagement with these presuppositions. In this engagement,
every single one of the key concepts of Western civilizationconcepts like
society, culture, nature, language, technology, individuality and personhood,
equality and inequality, even humanity itselfbecomes essentially contestable.
Theoretical work, in social and cultural anthropology, is largely a matter of
opening up these concepts for inspection and unpacking their contents,
thereby revealing the often hidden baggage that we carry with us into our
encounters with unfamiliar realities. If we are ever to reach a level of
understanding that breaks the barriers between Western and non-Western
worlds of life and thought, such work is indispensable. Yet it also leaves
anthropology perilously poised on a knife-edge. For how can a discipline whose
project is rooted in the intellectual history of the Western world meet the
challenge presented by non-Western understandings of humanity, culture and
social life without undercutting its own epistemological foundations?
Perhaps uniquely among academic disciplines, anthropology thrives on the
art of its own perpetual deconstruction. Caught at the intersection of two
cross-cutting tensions, between the humanities and natural sciences on the one
hand, and between theoretical speculation and lived experience on the other, it
leaves little room for intellectual complacency. Like philosophy, the remit of
anthropology is not confined to a delimited segment within a wider division of
academic labour; rather it exists to subvert any such tidy division, rendering
problematic the very foundations on which it rests. The best anthropological
writing is distinguished by its receptiveness to ideas springing from work in
subjects far beyond its conventional boundaries, and by its ability to connect
these ideas in ways that would not have occurred to their originators, who may
be more enclosed by their particular disciplinary frameworks. But to this
connecting enterprise it brings something more, namely the attempt to engage
our abstract ideas about what human beings might be like with an empirically
grounded knowledge of (certain) human beings as they really are, and of what
for them everyday life is all about. This engagement not only provides the
primary motivationapart from that of sheer curiosityfor ethnographic
inquiry, but also carries anthropology beyond the closeted realms of speculative
philosophy. Anthropology, if you will, is philosophy with the people in.
No more today than in the past, however, is anthropological work conducted
in an historical vacuum. Just as much as the people they study, anthropologists
are participants in the one world which we all inhabit, and therefore carry their
share of the responsibility for what goes on in it. In many parts of the world,
people currently face appalling deprivations, whether due to poverty, famine,
disease, war, or some combination of these. There is no doubt that
anthropological knowledge, tempered as it is by an awareness of the practical

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realities of life on the ground in real human communities, has a vital

contribution to make in the alleviation of human suffering. Moreover, to an
increasing extent, anthropologists have involved themselves as advocates on
behalf of the peoples among whom they have workedfor example in the
struggle for recognition of indigenous rights to landor as advisers or
consultants in various projects of development. In view of such involvements, it
has sometimes been suggested that a field of applied anthropology should be
recognized, alongside those branches of the discipline that are already well
established.
If this suggestion has not met with wholehearted approval, the reason does
not lie in any desire to keep anthropology pure, nor does it indicate that
anthropologists prefer to wash their hands of the moral and political
entailments of their involvement with local communities. It is rather that in the
conduct of anthropological work it is practically impossible to separate the
acquisition of knowledge from its application. The distinction between pure
and applied science rests on a premiss of detachment, the assumption that
scientists can know the world without having to involve themselves in it. But
anthropology rests on exactly the opposite premiss, that it is only by immersing
ourselves in the life-world of our fellow human beings that we shall ever
understand what it means to themand to us. Thus whatever else it may be,
anthropology is a science of engagement. Indeed it may be said that in
anthropology we study ourselves, precisely because it requires us to change our
conception of who we are, from an exclusive, Western we to an inclusive,
global one. To adopt an anthropological attitude is to drop the pretence of our
belonging to a select association of Westerners, uniquely privileged to look in
upon the inhabitants of other cultures, and to recognize that along with the
others whose company we share (albeit temporarily), we are all fellow travellers
in the same world. By comparing experiencesharing noteswe can reach a
better understanding of what such journeying entails, where we have come
from, and where we are going.

HUMANITY, CULTURE AND SOCIAL LIFE

This is an encyclopedia of anthropology, it is not an encyclopedia about
anthropology. The distinction is critical, and underwrites both the content of
the articles that follow and the structure of the volume as a whole. There is a
tendency, common to many branches of scholarship, for specialists to become
so absorbed in debates internal to the discipline that they lose sight of their
original purpose, namely to extend the scope of our knowledge of the world.
The debates become an object of study in themselves. Though there must be a
place in every discipline for a consideration of its history and its methods, I
believe it is important to resist the inclination to detach such consideration
from the primary objective of enlarging human understanding. In the case of
anthropology, this means that however much we may tangle with the details of

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