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Title
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History and Epistemology of Anthropology
-
Author
-
Appadurai, Arjun
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Research Area
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Theory
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Topic
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Theory ‐ Discipline specific
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Abstract
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This essay describes the field of social and cultural anthropology. The central concern of this subfield of anthropology is the study of human variations as a defining feature of the evolution of human societies and cultures. It stands in contrast to the development of other social and behavioral science disciplines that are based on evolutionism and has a stronger affinity to the humanities than these other disciplines. The present status of theory and research in social and cultural anthropology is described and promising courses of development going forward are identified.
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Related Essays
-
Heterarchy (Archaeology), Carole L. Crumley
-
Museum Anthropology (Anthropology), Candace S. Greene
-
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard Handler
-
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-
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-
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-
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Identifier
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etrds0162
-
extracted text
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History and Epistemology
of Anthropology
ARJUN APPADURAI
Abstract
This essay describes the field of social and cultural anthropology. The central concern
of this subfield of anthropology is the study of human variations as a defining feature
of the evolution of human societies and cultures. It stands in contrast to the development of other social and behavioral science disciplines that are based on evolutionism
and has a stronger affinity to the humanities than these other disciplines. The present
status of theory and research in social and cultural anthropology is described and
promising courses of development going forward are identified.
Today, the market in the social science disciplines is suffering from a strange
disease. Let us call it a disease of imitation. Economics has long wanted to
look like mathematics, or perhaps more realistically, like physics. The few
economists that have not succumbed to this tendency have gone “behavioral.” Political scientists also have a form of split personality: some want
to look like economists; others want to look like sociologists. As for sociology, it too is a moving target. Some sociologists want to be ethnographers,
examining the details of everyday life, especially in the modern West. Others, a dwindling number, also want to be mathematicians of the social, using
large data sets to identify large correlations and then seek explanations for
such macropatterns. Psychologists, at the other end of the spectrum from
economists in their interest in individual actors, motivations, and cognition,
suffer a similar variety of discipline-envy as economists, and have for some
time gravitated toward evolutionary biology and neuroscience as their exemplars. A simple way to explain these trends would be to note that the social
sciences, like all the sciences, are evolving, and like evolving creatures, they
seek certain parts of their environment as preferred niches. A less happy way
to look at these trends would be to say that all the social sciences have lost
their self-confidence and none have any respect for their founding figures.
Marx, Weber, Freud, Durkheim, Jevons, Knight, and many other founding
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
fathers of the social sciences from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries are now simply part of the prehistory of the social sciences.
Where does anthropology fit into this melancholy picture? Here the picture
is less clear, because anthropology, having early claimed the broad rubric
of the “study of man,” has never had a highly specific subject matter. Furthermore, it evolved differently in its major sites of national formation in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England, social anthropology emerged from the study of comparative religion and its founding
figures, such as Tylor, Marrett, and Frazier, were concerned with spirits, sacrifice, magic, and mythology. Later, after the fieldwork revolution of Haddon,
Rivers, and Malinowski, it became defined by an intense interest in the holistic study of remote, scale–scale societies. Throughout, social anthropology
evolved separately from archaeology and that distinction remains a hallmark
of British anthropology. In France, Durkheim was also interested in primitive religions, but he was deeply affected by Comte, Spencer, and Marx,
and thus imparted to French anthropology a permanent interest in the problems of social solidarity, the division of labor and the logic of moral progress.
For various specific reasons, Durkheim’s followers became preoccupied with
problems of classification, cognition, and speculation in primitive thought,
encouraging the domination of Levi-Straussian structuralism both in France
and beyond for almost the whole of the second half of the twentieth century.
Germany, and those countries influenced by Germanic models, developed a
form of ethnology which dominated by the interest in folklore, folk history,
and folkways, an emphasis which has recently been broken by the important of methods and theories of social anthropology mostly imported from
Britain.
In the United States, the profound influence of Franz Boas, generally
agreed to the be the founding father of American anthropology, brought
to the United States the concern of various neo-Kantian thinkers from
Germany, notably Dilthey, and ideas that addressed the obvious salience
of African Americans, Native Americans, and the emerging conditions of a
power multicultural democracy. Thus, it was that the major departments of
anthropology in the United States (Columbia, Chicago, Michigan, Berkeley)
became committed to the now embattled four-field approach, including
linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology.
It is no secret that this Boasian umbrella has for many decades now let
in a great deal of rain and these major departments and many others are
simply holding companies for the subfields, each of which consorts with
many other disciplines (such as metallurgy, evolutionary biology, linguistics,
literature, and others) as problems and interests shift within the four fields.
Other anthropological traditions, in places such as Africa, Australia, India,
Japan, and the Scandinavian countries, are simply rearrangements of trends
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
3
in the founding countries, reflecting variations based on local themes and
idiosyncrasies.
To the extent that the four-field umbrella has a serious intellectual foundation, it is the question of human evolution, as it relates to the history of
Homo sapiens. In itself, this interest is shared by many other natural and
social scientists. What anthropology has emphasized is the story of human
variation as a crucial part of the story of human evolution. Such variation
can be somatic, technological, linguistic, racial, or simply cultural. The finest
work in the anthropology of the twentieth century has opened up new vistas
in the study of human variation in each of these dimensions. Yet Boas, the
founding father of American anthropology and of the four-field approach,
was deeply opposed to the unilineal evolutionary approach that began with
Darwin and was taken to be the heart of the evolutionary doctrine of the
time. Boas, by contrast, thought that specific cultures evolved in their own
ways, often skipping stages or violating established sequences in the current
models of human evolution. In their stead, Boas installed a strong theory
of cultural relativism and the method of historical particularism. Ever since,
these arguments have held sway among many cultural anthropologists, who
have displayed a consistent allergy toward evolutionism in any guise.
Some major American products of the Boasian tradition of interest in
cultural history, such as Eric Wolf and Sindey Mintz, sought to supplement
historical particularism with their own varieties of Marxism. Others, such
as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, sought patterns in individual cultures, and pushed the idea of cultural relativism into the domains of child
development, war, and aesthetics. Yet others, such as Julian Steward, Lesley
White, and Marvin Harris developed various brands of cultural materialism,
anchored in distinct ideas about energy, agriculture, and technology.
The two dominant figures of American cultural anthropology in the
post-War period are without a doubt Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins,
who came from rather different academic traditions, although both taught at
the University of Chicago at crucial points in their lives, and Sahlins still is a
lively presence as an Emeritus Professor there. They had an uneasy relationship to each other’s work, in spite of sharing a deep distaste for any tendency
among cultural anthropologists to find common cause with sociobiology,
neuroscience, or other hard science approaches. Sahlins, originally very
interested in economy, ecology, and social variation, had a major conversion
to the structuralism of Levi-Strauss in the late 1960s and became committed
to finding a way to combine French structuralism with a certain kind of
historical approach to ethnography. Clifford Geertz, originally trained by
Clyde Kluckholn and Talcott Parsons at Harvard, was deeply influenced by
Max Weber and spent the first two decades of his career exploring economic,
social, and religious change in Indonesia and later in Morocco. In the early
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
1970s, he too had a sort of conversion experience, but in his case, it was to
what he called the interpretive turn, for which he became famous across the
humanities and cultural studies. His approach was an American brew of
approaches drawn from the hermeneutical tradition, various literary critical
styles, and from such American pragmatists as Dewey and William James.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Sahlins ruled the structuralist roost in American
anthropology and Geertz owned the rest. Their joint and collective influence meant that Boas’ commitments to cultural relativism and historical
particularism are still in play but the four-field approach was more or less
turned into an administrative convenience at most major departments of
anthropology. Archaeology and biological anthropology developed largely
in their own directions. Linguistic anthropology, interestingly, became an
increasing part of the repertoire of all American anthropology departments.
The subject of language as a part of the cultural anthropology tradition in
the United States deserves special remark. From very early in the twentieth
century, and very much in the spirit of Boas, language was an important part
of the research of American cultural anthropologists. The key historical figure
in this process was Edward Sapir, a student of Boas, who devoted his life to
an exploration of how linguistics could contribute to the study of what he
called cultural relativity (with a conscious reference to Albert Einstein) and
the role of language in this sort of relativity. Edward Sapir spent much of his
life in detailed studies of many languages, mostly those of North American
indigenous populations, and along with his equally famous pupil Benjamin
Whorf, developed the idea that our mental and linguistic categories were
cast in unique and varied cultural molds, and that, as a consequence, the
biggest responsibility of cultural anthropology was to understand how linguistic variation was the crucible of cultural variation. Even today, there are
important linguistic anthropologists who derive their program from Sapir
and Whorf, and have drawn on their approach to cultural relativity to explain
linguistic variation as a necessary source and symptom of cultural variation.
But the influence of Sapir and Whorf (traceable to the ideas of Franz Boas)
came under severe attack from several directions, starting in the 1960s.
On one hand, Noam Chomsky and his followers became convinced of the
fundamental place of universal cognitive structures underlying all surface
variation in language and thus in culture. They had no use for the doctrine
of linguistic and cultural relativity. Even earlier, Claude Levi-Strauss, who
was a great admirer of Boas, spent some crucial years in the United States
in the years immediately after the Second World War and developed the
beginnings of his version of anthropological structuralism, with its roots in
the phonetic work of the great French linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. From
Saussure, Levi-Strauss took the idea that meaning in language, and thus
in culture, was not located at the level of words (morphemes) but rather
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
5
at the level of phonemes, and even specifically, derivable from the contrast
between opposed sets of phonemes (such as the phonemes “ba” and “fa”).
Levi-Strauss’ most productive intellectual move was to bring this Saussurian
idea up to the level of recognizable words and pairs such as night and day,
raw and cooked, man and woman, father and mother.
This derivation from Saussure arose from one of the richest mistakes in the
history of social science in the twentieth century, namely the idea that pairs of
words, in any language, which were simply semantically contrastive, could
be treated as the foundational building blocks of culture, just as Saussure had
shown for contrastive phonemes. This move allowed Levi-Strauss to examine myths and cosmologies from many societies, to show that foundational
semantic oppositions were even more meaningful than phonetic contrasts,
although, in truth, the two phenomena have nothing to do with one another.
As in natural science, models do not have to be true or lawful. They simply
have to be productive. And Levi-Strauss’ strategy of analyzing cosmologies
and societies as reflecting simple semantic contrasts allowed him to abandon
the Boasian heritage of cultural relativism and relativity and ally himself with
such thinkers as Chomsky, with whom he shared a faith in the common neurological operations of all human minds, regardless of cultural variation. The
rest is not history, but it certainly seemed that way for some decades, during
which Levi-Strauss was the sacred reference point for many anthropologists
on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in many other regions.
Starting in the late 1960s, American anthropologists brought language back
into the study of culture by developing an insight which is owed to American
pragmatic traditions on one hand, and to British ideas, particularly those of
the key philosopher J. L. Austin, about how “to do things with words.” This
movement, which can broadly be described as sociolinguistics, generated
some of the most creative work in American linguistics and anthropology
in the 1970s and ever since. Its key figures were Dell Hymes, William
Labov, John Gumperz, Michael Silverstein, and their many students and
followers, who branched out and shaped such fields as discourse analysis,
ethnomethodology, conversational analysis, and meta-pragmatics, which
incorporated the best traditions of Boasian fieldwork, Whorfian attention to
cultural singularities, Pierceian interest in semiosis, and Austinian concerns
with language in use, while also taking the best out of the foundational
importance of the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure. This mix of
methods and insights about the relationship between language and culture
is today the key to why young American anthropologists generate more
linguistically sensitive work than their peers trained in other countries.
Even so, no one could have anticipated how the world began to change in
big ways starting in the early 1990s and as a consequence, also unsettled the
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
social sciences. Anthropology was part of these changes and the new interest among younger anthropologists in such topics as diaspora, globalization,
advertising, violence, sovereignty, war, refugees, and human rights makes
Sahlins and Geertz look old-fashioned, although they dominated the anthropological avant-garde of the two prior decades.
Today, cultural anthropologists in the United States, and certainly elsewhere in the world, have largely abandoned the umbrella interest in human
evolution and variation which marked the Boasian area and generated the
four-field approach. But the news is not altogether negative. They have
developed a new interest in the human body, in technology, and in science.
But this interest is not defined by shared scientific questions but rather by a
new anthropological interest in science studies (also shared by sociologists
and other human scientists) which has generated brilliant ethnographies of
the global pharmaceutical industry; the human genome project; the birth
of nuclear engineering at Los Alamos; the problems of oceans, climate, and
cloning; and virtually every other area of contemporary scientific work. This
work uses the ethnographic method to explain how scientists and engineers
work and create their models, theories, and policies about nature. Scientists,
doctors, and engineers are anthropology’s new primitives. By extension,
this new class of primitives also includes derivatives traders, development
professionals, army strategists, and other professionals whose cultures
share codes of honor, private languages, secret strategies, and rituals of
induction and recognition. Many cultural anthropologists have given up on
quantification but they are keenly interested in every variety of professional
quantifier.
This is not an exclusive trend. There are many cultural anthropologists
who continue to work on empirically oriented topics which bring them
into active contact with their colleagues in archaeology and biological
anthropology. They produce interesting work on economics, demography,
and technology to which they bring an ethnographic spin. But these more
traditionally trained and committed scholars will probably admit that they
do not represent the most exciting sectors of their discipline. In this sense,
the “normal” science portion of cultural and social anthropology remains
active and even the idea of a unified science of humanity which might unite
anthropologists in all the four fields is by no means dead. But it does not
define the most exciting agendas in the best journals, blogs, and conferences
in which the younger generation displays its wares.
Like every field in the chaotic social science scene today, anthropologists
are trying to maintain both their core and their emerging border territories
equally. This is always a tough act. For anthropology, however, it is not a
bad thing. Anthropology, of all the social science fields, has always been a
bit of a no-host bar, allowing widely different conversations to take place
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
7
among friends, strangers, and even enemies. It is today, and has always been,
a broker discipline, claiming to study everything about humanity but in fact
performing a curating and convening role, both between the human and
natural sciences, and between the ever-changing social science disciplines
themselves. This is not a bad place to occupy in the academic division of
labor. And anthropologists seem to be having fun in playing this role, today
as in the past.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition (1st ed.).
London, England: Verso.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press.
Ginsburg, F. D., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (Eds.) (2002). Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hicks, D. (2013). Four-field anthropology: Charter myths and time warps from St.
Louis to Oxford. Current Anthropology, 54(6), 753–763. doi:10.1086/673385
Zaloom, C. (2010). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London (1st
ed.). Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
ARJUN APPADURAI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Arjun Appadurai is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture,
and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education,
and Human Development. He is a prominent contemporary social-cultural
anthropologist, having formerly served as Provost and Senior Vice President
for Academic Affairs at The New School in NYC. He has held various
professorial chairs and visiting appointments at some of top institutions in
the United States and Europe. In addition, he has served on several scholarly
and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and
India. Dr. Appadurai is world renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of
globalization, having authored numerous books and scholarly articles. The
nature and significance of his contributions throughout his academic career
have earned him the reputation as a leading figure in his field. His latest
book is The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso,
2013). He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
RELATED ESSAYS
Heterarchy (Archaeology), Carole L. Crumley
Museum Anthropology (Anthropology), Candace S. Greene
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard
Handler
The Use of Geophysical Survey in Archaeology (Methods), Timothy J.
Horsley
Ethnography in the Digital Age (Methods), Alan Howard and Alexander
Mawyer
Queer Theory (Anthropology), Martin F. Manalansan
Alternative Polities (Archaeology), Roderick J. McIntosh
Business Anthropology (Anthropology), Brian Moeran
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology (Archaeology), Sarah Parcak
-
History and Epistemology
of Anthropology
ARJUN APPADURAI
Abstract
This essay describes the field of social and cultural anthropology. The central concern
of this subfield of anthropology is the study of human variations as a defining feature
of the evolution of human societies and cultures. It stands in contrast to the development of other social and behavioral science disciplines that are based on evolutionism
and has a stronger affinity to the humanities than these other disciplines. The present
status of theory and research in social and cultural anthropology is described and
promising courses of development going forward are identified.
Today, the market in the social science disciplines is suffering from a strange
disease. Let us call it a disease of imitation. Economics has long wanted to
look like mathematics, or perhaps more realistically, like physics. The few
economists that have not succumbed to this tendency have gone “behavioral.” Political scientists also have a form of split personality: some want
to look like economists; others want to look like sociologists. As for sociology, it too is a moving target. Some sociologists want to be ethnographers,
examining the details of everyday life, especially in the modern West. Others, a dwindling number, also want to be mathematicians of the social, using
large data sets to identify large correlations and then seek explanations for
such macropatterns. Psychologists, at the other end of the spectrum from
economists in their interest in individual actors, motivations, and cognition,
suffer a similar variety of discipline-envy as economists, and have for some
time gravitated toward evolutionary biology and neuroscience as their exemplars. A simple way to explain these trends would be to note that the social
sciences, like all the sciences, are evolving, and like evolving creatures, they
seek certain parts of their environment as preferred niches. A less happy way
to look at these trends would be to say that all the social sciences have lost
their self-confidence and none have any respect for their founding figures.
Marx, Weber, Freud, Durkheim, Jevons, Knight, and many other founding
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
fathers of the social sciences from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries are now simply part of the prehistory of the social sciences.
Where does anthropology fit into this melancholy picture? Here the picture
is less clear, because anthropology, having early claimed the broad rubric
of the “study of man,” has never had a highly specific subject matter. Furthermore, it evolved differently in its major sites of national formation in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England, social anthropology emerged from the study of comparative religion and its founding
figures, such as Tylor, Marrett, and Frazier, were concerned with spirits, sacrifice, magic, and mythology. Later, after the fieldwork revolution of Haddon,
Rivers, and Malinowski, it became defined by an intense interest in the holistic study of remote, scale–scale societies. Throughout, social anthropology
evolved separately from archaeology and that distinction remains a hallmark
of British anthropology. In France, Durkheim was also interested in primitive religions, but he was deeply affected by Comte, Spencer, and Marx,
and thus imparted to French anthropology a permanent interest in the problems of social solidarity, the division of labor and the logic of moral progress.
For various specific reasons, Durkheim’s followers became preoccupied with
problems of classification, cognition, and speculation in primitive thought,
encouraging the domination of Levi-Straussian structuralism both in France
and beyond for almost the whole of the second half of the twentieth century.
Germany, and those countries influenced by Germanic models, developed a
form of ethnology which dominated by the interest in folklore, folk history,
and folkways, an emphasis which has recently been broken by the important of methods and theories of social anthropology mostly imported from
Britain.
In the United States, the profound influence of Franz Boas, generally
agreed to the be the founding father of American anthropology, brought
to the United States the concern of various neo-Kantian thinkers from
Germany, notably Dilthey, and ideas that addressed the obvious salience
of African Americans, Native Americans, and the emerging conditions of a
power multicultural democracy. Thus, it was that the major departments of
anthropology in the United States (Columbia, Chicago, Michigan, Berkeley)
became committed to the now embattled four-field approach, including
linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology.
It is no secret that this Boasian umbrella has for many decades now let
in a great deal of rain and these major departments and many others are
simply holding companies for the subfields, each of which consorts with
many other disciplines (such as metallurgy, evolutionary biology, linguistics,
literature, and others) as problems and interests shift within the four fields.
Other anthropological traditions, in places such as Africa, Australia, India,
Japan, and the Scandinavian countries, are simply rearrangements of trends
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
3
in the founding countries, reflecting variations based on local themes and
idiosyncrasies.
To the extent that the four-field umbrella has a serious intellectual foundation, it is the question of human evolution, as it relates to the history of
Homo sapiens. In itself, this interest is shared by many other natural and
social scientists. What anthropology has emphasized is the story of human
variation as a crucial part of the story of human evolution. Such variation
can be somatic, technological, linguistic, racial, or simply cultural. The finest
work in the anthropology of the twentieth century has opened up new vistas
in the study of human variation in each of these dimensions. Yet Boas, the
founding father of American anthropology and of the four-field approach,
was deeply opposed to the unilineal evolutionary approach that began with
Darwin and was taken to be the heart of the evolutionary doctrine of the
time. Boas, by contrast, thought that specific cultures evolved in their own
ways, often skipping stages or violating established sequences in the current
models of human evolution. In their stead, Boas installed a strong theory
of cultural relativism and the method of historical particularism. Ever since,
these arguments have held sway among many cultural anthropologists, who
have displayed a consistent allergy toward evolutionism in any guise.
Some major American products of the Boasian tradition of interest in
cultural history, such as Eric Wolf and Sindey Mintz, sought to supplement
historical particularism with their own varieties of Marxism. Others, such
as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, sought patterns in individual cultures, and pushed the idea of cultural relativism into the domains of child
development, war, and aesthetics. Yet others, such as Julian Steward, Lesley
White, and Marvin Harris developed various brands of cultural materialism,
anchored in distinct ideas about energy, agriculture, and technology.
The two dominant figures of American cultural anthropology in the
post-War period are without a doubt Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins,
who came from rather different academic traditions, although both taught at
the University of Chicago at crucial points in their lives, and Sahlins still is a
lively presence as an Emeritus Professor there. They had an uneasy relationship to each other’s work, in spite of sharing a deep distaste for any tendency
among cultural anthropologists to find common cause with sociobiology,
neuroscience, or other hard science approaches. Sahlins, originally very
interested in economy, ecology, and social variation, had a major conversion
to the structuralism of Levi-Strauss in the late 1960s and became committed
to finding a way to combine French structuralism with a certain kind of
historical approach to ethnography. Clifford Geertz, originally trained by
Clyde Kluckholn and Talcott Parsons at Harvard, was deeply influenced by
Max Weber and spent the first two decades of his career exploring economic,
social, and religious change in Indonesia and later in Morocco. In the early
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
1970s, he too had a sort of conversion experience, but in his case, it was to
what he called the interpretive turn, for which he became famous across the
humanities and cultural studies. His approach was an American brew of
approaches drawn from the hermeneutical tradition, various literary critical
styles, and from such American pragmatists as Dewey and William James.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Sahlins ruled the structuralist roost in American
anthropology and Geertz owned the rest. Their joint and collective influence meant that Boas’ commitments to cultural relativism and historical
particularism are still in play but the four-field approach was more or less
turned into an administrative convenience at most major departments of
anthropology. Archaeology and biological anthropology developed largely
in their own directions. Linguistic anthropology, interestingly, became an
increasing part of the repertoire of all American anthropology departments.
The subject of language as a part of the cultural anthropology tradition in
the United States deserves special remark. From very early in the twentieth
century, and very much in the spirit of Boas, language was an important part
of the research of American cultural anthropologists. The key historical figure
in this process was Edward Sapir, a student of Boas, who devoted his life to
an exploration of how linguistics could contribute to the study of what he
called cultural relativity (with a conscious reference to Albert Einstein) and
the role of language in this sort of relativity. Edward Sapir spent much of his
life in detailed studies of many languages, mostly those of North American
indigenous populations, and along with his equally famous pupil Benjamin
Whorf, developed the idea that our mental and linguistic categories were
cast in unique and varied cultural molds, and that, as a consequence, the
biggest responsibility of cultural anthropology was to understand how linguistic variation was the crucible of cultural variation. Even today, there are
important linguistic anthropologists who derive their program from Sapir
and Whorf, and have drawn on their approach to cultural relativity to explain
linguistic variation as a necessary source and symptom of cultural variation.
But the influence of Sapir and Whorf (traceable to the ideas of Franz Boas)
came under severe attack from several directions, starting in the 1960s.
On one hand, Noam Chomsky and his followers became convinced of the
fundamental place of universal cognitive structures underlying all surface
variation in language and thus in culture. They had no use for the doctrine
of linguistic and cultural relativity. Even earlier, Claude Levi-Strauss, who
was a great admirer of Boas, spent some crucial years in the United States
in the years immediately after the Second World War and developed the
beginnings of his version of anthropological structuralism, with its roots in
the phonetic work of the great French linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. From
Saussure, Levi-Strauss took the idea that meaning in language, and thus
in culture, was not located at the level of words (morphemes) but rather
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
5
at the level of phonemes, and even specifically, derivable from the contrast
between opposed sets of phonemes (such as the phonemes “ba” and “fa”).
Levi-Strauss’ most productive intellectual move was to bring this Saussurian
idea up to the level of recognizable words and pairs such as night and day,
raw and cooked, man and woman, father and mother.
This derivation from Saussure arose from one of the richest mistakes in the
history of social science in the twentieth century, namely the idea that pairs of
words, in any language, which were simply semantically contrastive, could
be treated as the foundational building blocks of culture, just as Saussure had
shown for contrastive phonemes. This move allowed Levi-Strauss to examine myths and cosmologies from many societies, to show that foundational
semantic oppositions were even more meaningful than phonetic contrasts,
although, in truth, the two phenomena have nothing to do with one another.
As in natural science, models do not have to be true or lawful. They simply
have to be productive. And Levi-Strauss’ strategy of analyzing cosmologies
and societies as reflecting simple semantic contrasts allowed him to abandon
the Boasian heritage of cultural relativism and relativity and ally himself with
such thinkers as Chomsky, with whom he shared a faith in the common neurological operations of all human minds, regardless of cultural variation. The
rest is not history, but it certainly seemed that way for some decades, during
which Levi-Strauss was the sacred reference point for many anthropologists
on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in many other regions.
Starting in the late 1960s, American anthropologists brought language back
into the study of culture by developing an insight which is owed to American
pragmatic traditions on one hand, and to British ideas, particularly those of
the key philosopher J. L. Austin, about how “to do things with words.” This
movement, which can broadly be described as sociolinguistics, generated
some of the most creative work in American linguistics and anthropology
in the 1970s and ever since. Its key figures were Dell Hymes, William
Labov, John Gumperz, Michael Silverstein, and their many students and
followers, who branched out and shaped such fields as discourse analysis,
ethnomethodology, conversational analysis, and meta-pragmatics, which
incorporated the best traditions of Boasian fieldwork, Whorfian attention to
cultural singularities, Pierceian interest in semiosis, and Austinian concerns
with language in use, while also taking the best out of the foundational
importance of the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure. This mix of
methods and insights about the relationship between language and culture
is today the key to why young American anthropologists generate more
linguistically sensitive work than their peers trained in other countries.
Even so, no one could have anticipated how the world began to change in
big ways starting in the early 1990s and as a consequence, also unsettled the
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
social sciences. Anthropology was part of these changes and the new interest among younger anthropologists in such topics as diaspora, globalization,
advertising, violence, sovereignty, war, refugees, and human rights makes
Sahlins and Geertz look old-fashioned, although they dominated the anthropological avant-garde of the two prior decades.
Today, cultural anthropologists in the United States, and certainly elsewhere in the world, have largely abandoned the umbrella interest in human
evolution and variation which marked the Boasian area and generated the
four-field approach. But the news is not altogether negative. They have
developed a new interest in the human body, in technology, and in science.
But this interest is not defined by shared scientific questions but rather by a
new anthropological interest in science studies (also shared by sociologists
and other human scientists) which has generated brilliant ethnographies of
the global pharmaceutical industry; the human genome project; the birth
of nuclear engineering at Los Alamos; the problems of oceans, climate, and
cloning; and virtually every other area of contemporary scientific work. This
work uses the ethnographic method to explain how scientists and engineers
work and create their models, theories, and policies about nature. Scientists,
doctors, and engineers are anthropology’s new primitives. By extension,
this new class of primitives also includes derivatives traders, development
professionals, army strategists, and other professionals whose cultures
share codes of honor, private languages, secret strategies, and rituals of
induction and recognition. Many cultural anthropologists have given up on
quantification but they are keenly interested in every variety of professional
quantifier.
This is not an exclusive trend. There are many cultural anthropologists
who continue to work on empirically oriented topics which bring them
into active contact with their colleagues in archaeology and biological
anthropology. They produce interesting work on economics, demography,
and technology to which they bring an ethnographic spin. But these more
traditionally trained and committed scholars will probably admit that they
do not represent the most exciting sectors of their discipline. In this sense,
the “normal” science portion of cultural and social anthropology remains
active and even the idea of a unified science of humanity which might unite
anthropologists in all the four fields is by no means dead. But it does not
define the most exciting agendas in the best journals, blogs, and conferences
in which the younger generation displays its wares.
Like every field in the chaotic social science scene today, anthropologists
are trying to maintain both their core and their emerging border territories
equally. This is always a tough act. For anthropology, however, it is not a
bad thing. Anthropology, of all the social science fields, has always been a
bit of a no-host bar, allowing widely different conversations to take place
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
7
among friends, strangers, and even enemies. It is today, and has always been,
a broker discipline, claiming to study everything about humanity but in fact
performing a curating and convening role, both between the human and
natural sciences, and between the ever-changing social science disciplines
themselves. This is not a bad place to occupy in the academic division of
labor. And anthropologists seem to be having fun in playing this role, today
as in the past.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition (1st ed.).
London, England: Verso.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press.
Ginsburg, F. D., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (Eds.) (2002). Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hicks, D. (2013). Four-field anthropology: Charter myths and time warps from St.
Louis to Oxford. Current Anthropology, 54(6), 753–763. doi:10.1086/673385
Zaloom, C. (2010). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London (1st
ed.). Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
ARJUN APPADURAI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Arjun Appadurai is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture,
and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education,
and Human Development. He is a prominent contemporary social-cultural
anthropologist, having formerly served as Provost and Senior Vice President
for Academic Affairs at The New School in NYC. He has held various
professorial chairs and visiting appointments at some of top institutions in
the United States and Europe. In addition, he has served on several scholarly
and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and
India. Dr. Appadurai is world renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of
globalization, having authored numerous books and scholarly articles. The
nature and significance of his contributions throughout his academic career
have earned him the reputation as a leading figure in his field. His latest
book is The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso,
2013). He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
RELATED ESSAYS
Heterarchy (Archaeology), Carole L. Crumley
Museum Anthropology (Anthropology), Candace S. Greene
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard
Handler
The Use of Geophysical Survey in Archaeology (Methods), Timothy J.
Horsley
Ethnography in the Digital Age (Methods), Alan Howard and Alexander
Mawyer
Queer Theory (Anthropology), Martin F. Manalansan
Alternative Polities (Archaeology), Roderick J. McIntosh
Business Anthropology (Anthropology), Brian Moeran
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology (Archaeology), Sarah Parcak
History and Epistemology
of Anthropology
ARJUN APPADURAI
Abstract
This essay describes the field of social and cultural anthropology. The central concern
of this subfield of anthropology is the study of human variations as a defining feature
of the evolution of human societies and cultures. It stands in contrast to the development of other social and behavioral science disciplines that are based on evolutionism
and has a stronger affinity to the humanities than these other disciplines. The present
status of theory and research in social and cultural anthropology is described and
promising courses of development going forward are identified.
Today, the market in the social science disciplines is suffering from a strange
disease. Let us call it a disease of imitation. Economics has long wanted to
look like mathematics, or perhaps more realistically, like physics. The few
economists that have not succumbed to this tendency have gone “behavioral.” Political scientists also have a form of split personality: some want
to look like economists; others want to look like sociologists. As for sociology, it too is a moving target. Some sociologists want to be ethnographers,
examining the details of everyday life, especially in the modern West. Others, a dwindling number, also want to be mathematicians of the social, using
large data sets to identify large correlations and then seek explanations for
such macropatterns. Psychologists, at the other end of the spectrum from
economists in their interest in individual actors, motivations, and cognition,
suffer a similar variety of discipline-envy as economists, and have for some
time gravitated toward evolutionary biology and neuroscience as their exemplars. A simple way to explain these trends would be to note that the social
sciences, like all the sciences, are evolving, and like evolving creatures, they
seek certain parts of their environment as preferred niches. A less happy way
to look at these trends would be to say that all the social sciences have lost
their self-confidence and none have any respect for their founding figures.
Marx, Weber, Freud, Durkheim, Jevons, Knight, and many other founding
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
fathers of the social sciences from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries are now simply part of the prehistory of the social sciences.
Where does anthropology fit into this melancholy picture? Here the picture
is less clear, because anthropology, having early claimed the broad rubric
of the “study of man,” has never had a highly specific subject matter. Furthermore, it evolved differently in its major sites of national formation in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England, social anthropology emerged from the study of comparative religion and its founding
figures, such as Tylor, Marrett, and Frazier, were concerned with spirits, sacrifice, magic, and mythology. Later, after the fieldwork revolution of Haddon,
Rivers, and Malinowski, it became defined by an intense interest in the holistic study of remote, scale–scale societies. Throughout, social anthropology
evolved separately from archaeology and that distinction remains a hallmark
of British anthropology. In France, Durkheim was also interested in primitive religions, but he was deeply affected by Comte, Spencer, and Marx,
and thus imparted to French anthropology a permanent interest in the problems of social solidarity, the division of labor and the logic of moral progress.
For various specific reasons, Durkheim’s followers became preoccupied with
problems of classification, cognition, and speculation in primitive thought,
encouraging the domination of Levi-Straussian structuralism both in France
and beyond for almost the whole of the second half of the twentieth century.
Germany, and those countries influenced by Germanic models, developed a
form of ethnology which dominated by the interest in folklore, folk history,
and folkways, an emphasis which has recently been broken by the important of methods and theories of social anthropology mostly imported from
Britain.
In the United States, the profound influence of Franz Boas, generally
agreed to the be the founding father of American anthropology, brought
to the United States the concern of various neo-Kantian thinkers from
Germany, notably Dilthey, and ideas that addressed the obvious salience
of African Americans, Native Americans, and the emerging conditions of a
power multicultural democracy. Thus, it was that the major departments of
anthropology in the United States (Columbia, Chicago, Michigan, Berkeley)
became committed to the now embattled four-field approach, including
linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology.
It is no secret that this Boasian umbrella has for many decades now let
in a great deal of rain and these major departments and many others are
simply holding companies for the subfields, each of which consorts with
many other disciplines (such as metallurgy, evolutionary biology, linguistics,
literature, and others) as problems and interests shift within the four fields.
Other anthropological traditions, in places such as Africa, Australia, India,
Japan, and the Scandinavian countries, are simply rearrangements of trends
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
3
in the founding countries, reflecting variations based on local themes and
idiosyncrasies.
To the extent that the four-field umbrella has a serious intellectual foundation, it is the question of human evolution, as it relates to the history of
Homo sapiens. In itself, this interest is shared by many other natural and
social scientists. What anthropology has emphasized is the story of human
variation as a crucial part of the story of human evolution. Such variation
can be somatic, technological, linguistic, racial, or simply cultural. The finest
work in the anthropology of the twentieth century has opened up new vistas
in the study of human variation in each of these dimensions. Yet Boas, the
founding father of American anthropology and of the four-field approach,
was deeply opposed to the unilineal evolutionary approach that began with
Darwin and was taken to be the heart of the evolutionary doctrine of the
time. Boas, by contrast, thought that specific cultures evolved in their own
ways, often skipping stages or violating established sequences in the current
models of human evolution. In their stead, Boas installed a strong theory
of cultural relativism and the method of historical particularism. Ever since,
these arguments have held sway among many cultural anthropologists, who
have displayed a consistent allergy toward evolutionism in any guise.
Some major American products of the Boasian tradition of interest in
cultural history, such as Eric Wolf and Sindey Mintz, sought to supplement
historical particularism with their own varieties of Marxism. Others, such
as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, sought patterns in individual cultures, and pushed the idea of cultural relativism into the domains of child
development, war, and aesthetics. Yet others, such as Julian Steward, Lesley
White, and Marvin Harris developed various brands of cultural materialism,
anchored in distinct ideas about energy, agriculture, and technology.
The two dominant figures of American cultural anthropology in the
post-War period are without a doubt Clifford Geertz and Marshall Sahlins,
who came from rather different academic traditions, although both taught at
the University of Chicago at crucial points in their lives, and Sahlins still is a
lively presence as an Emeritus Professor there. They had an uneasy relationship to each other’s work, in spite of sharing a deep distaste for any tendency
among cultural anthropologists to find common cause with sociobiology,
neuroscience, or other hard science approaches. Sahlins, originally very
interested in economy, ecology, and social variation, had a major conversion
to the structuralism of Levi-Strauss in the late 1960s and became committed
to finding a way to combine French structuralism with a certain kind of
historical approach to ethnography. Clifford Geertz, originally trained by
Clyde Kluckholn and Talcott Parsons at Harvard, was deeply influenced by
Max Weber and spent the first two decades of his career exploring economic,
social, and religious change in Indonesia and later in Morocco. In the early
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
1970s, he too had a sort of conversion experience, but in his case, it was to
what he called the interpretive turn, for which he became famous across the
humanities and cultural studies. His approach was an American brew of
approaches drawn from the hermeneutical tradition, various literary critical
styles, and from such American pragmatists as Dewey and William James.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Sahlins ruled the structuralist roost in American
anthropology and Geertz owned the rest. Their joint and collective influence meant that Boas’ commitments to cultural relativism and historical
particularism are still in play but the four-field approach was more or less
turned into an administrative convenience at most major departments of
anthropology. Archaeology and biological anthropology developed largely
in their own directions. Linguistic anthropology, interestingly, became an
increasing part of the repertoire of all American anthropology departments.
The subject of language as a part of the cultural anthropology tradition in
the United States deserves special remark. From very early in the twentieth
century, and very much in the spirit of Boas, language was an important part
of the research of American cultural anthropologists. The key historical figure
in this process was Edward Sapir, a student of Boas, who devoted his life to
an exploration of how linguistics could contribute to the study of what he
called cultural relativity (with a conscious reference to Albert Einstein) and
the role of language in this sort of relativity. Edward Sapir spent much of his
life in detailed studies of many languages, mostly those of North American
indigenous populations, and along with his equally famous pupil Benjamin
Whorf, developed the idea that our mental and linguistic categories were
cast in unique and varied cultural molds, and that, as a consequence, the
biggest responsibility of cultural anthropology was to understand how linguistic variation was the crucible of cultural variation. Even today, there are
important linguistic anthropologists who derive their program from Sapir
and Whorf, and have drawn on their approach to cultural relativity to explain
linguistic variation as a necessary source and symptom of cultural variation.
But the influence of Sapir and Whorf (traceable to the ideas of Franz Boas)
came under severe attack from several directions, starting in the 1960s.
On one hand, Noam Chomsky and his followers became convinced of the
fundamental place of universal cognitive structures underlying all surface
variation in language and thus in culture. They had no use for the doctrine
of linguistic and cultural relativity. Even earlier, Claude Levi-Strauss, who
was a great admirer of Boas, spent some crucial years in the United States
in the years immediately after the Second World War and developed the
beginnings of his version of anthropological structuralism, with its roots in
the phonetic work of the great French linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. From
Saussure, Levi-Strauss took the idea that meaning in language, and thus
in culture, was not located at the level of words (morphemes) but rather
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
5
at the level of phonemes, and even specifically, derivable from the contrast
between opposed sets of phonemes (such as the phonemes “ba” and “fa”).
Levi-Strauss’ most productive intellectual move was to bring this Saussurian
idea up to the level of recognizable words and pairs such as night and day,
raw and cooked, man and woman, father and mother.
This derivation from Saussure arose from one of the richest mistakes in the
history of social science in the twentieth century, namely the idea that pairs of
words, in any language, which were simply semantically contrastive, could
be treated as the foundational building blocks of culture, just as Saussure had
shown for contrastive phonemes. This move allowed Levi-Strauss to examine myths and cosmologies from many societies, to show that foundational
semantic oppositions were even more meaningful than phonetic contrasts,
although, in truth, the two phenomena have nothing to do with one another.
As in natural science, models do not have to be true or lawful. They simply
have to be productive. And Levi-Strauss’ strategy of analyzing cosmologies
and societies as reflecting simple semantic contrasts allowed him to abandon
the Boasian heritage of cultural relativism and relativity and ally himself with
such thinkers as Chomsky, with whom he shared a faith in the common neurological operations of all human minds, regardless of cultural variation. The
rest is not history, but it certainly seemed that way for some decades, during
which Levi-Strauss was the sacred reference point for many anthropologists
on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in many other regions.
Starting in the late 1960s, American anthropologists brought language back
into the study of culture by developing an insight which is owed to American
pragmatic traditions on one hand, and to British ideas, particularly those of
the key philosopher J. L. Austin, about how “to do things with words.” This
movement, which can broadly be described as sociolinguistics, generated
some of the most creative work in American linguistics and anthropology
in the 1970s and ever since. Its key figures were Dell Hymes, William
Labov, John Gumperz, Michael Silverstein, and their many students and
followers, who branched out and shaped such fields as discourse analysis,
ethnomethodology, conversational analysis, and meta-pragmatics, which
incorporated the best traditions of Boasian fieldwork, Whorfian attention to
cultural singularities, Pierceian interest in semiosis, and Austinian concerns
with language in use, while also taking the best out of the foundational
importance of the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure. This mix of
methods and insights about the relationship between language and culture
is today the key to why young American anthropologists generate more
linguistically sensitive work than their peers trained in other countries.
Even so, no one could have anticipated how the world began to change in
big ways starting in the early 1990s and as a consequence, also unsettled the
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
social sciences. Anthropology was part of these changes and the new interest among younger anthropologists in such topics as diaspora, globalization,
advertising, violence, sovereignty, war, refugees, and human rights makes
Sahlins and Geertz look old-fashioned, although they dominated the anthropological avant-garde of the two prior decades.
Today, cultural anthropologists in the United States, and certainly elsewhere in the world, have largely abandoned the umbrella interest in human
evolution and variation which marked the Boasian area and generated the
four-field approach. But the news is not altogether negative. They have
developed a new interest in the human body, in technology, and in science.
But this interest is not defined by shared scientific questions but rather by a
new anthropological interest in science studies (also shared by sociologists
and other human scientists) which has generated brilliant ethnographies of
the global pharmaceutical industry; the human genome project; the birth
of nuclear engineering at Los Alamos; the problems of oceans, climate, and
cloning; and virtually every other area of contemporary scientific work. This
work uses the ethnographic method to explain how scientists and engineers
work and create their models, theories, and policies about nature. Scientists,
doctors, and engineers are anthropology’s new primitives. By extension,
this new class of primitives also includes derivatives traders, development
professionals, army strategists, and other professionals whose cultures
share codes of honor, private languages, secret strategies, and rituals of
induction and recognition. Many cultural anthropologists have given up on
quantification but they are keenly interested in every variety of professional
quantifier.
This is not an exclusive trend. There are many cultural anthropologists
who continue to work on empirically oriented topics which bring them
into active contact with their colleagues in archaeology and biological
anthropology. They produce interesting work on economics, demography,
and technology to which they bring an ethnographic spin. But these more
traditionally trained and committed scholars will probably admit that they
do not represent the most exciting sectors of their discipline. In this sense,
the “normal” science portion of cultural and social anthropology remains
active and even the idea of a unified science of humanity which might unite
anthropologists in all the four fields is by no means dead. But it does not
define the most exciting agendas in the best journals, blogs, and conferences
in which the younger generation displays its wares.
Like every field in the chaotic social science scene today, anthropologists
are trying to maintain both their core and their emerging border territories
equally. This is always a tough act. For anthropology, however, it is not a
bad thing. Anthropology, of all the social science fields, has always been a
bit of a no-host bar, allowing widely different conversations to take place
History and Epistemology of Anthropology
7
among friends, strangers, and even enemies. It is today, and has always been,
a broker discipline, claiming to study everything about humanity but in fact
performing a curating and convening role, both between the human and
natural sciences, and between the ever-changing social science disciplines
themselves. This is not a bad place to occupy in the academic division of
labor. And anthropologists seem to be having fun in playing this role, today
as in the past.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition (1st ed.).
London, England: Verso.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic anthropology. New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press.
Ginsburg, F. D., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (Eds.) (2002). Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hicks, D. (2013). Four-field anthropology: Charter myths and time warps from St.
Louis to Oxford. Current Anthropology, 54(6), 753–763. doi:10.1086/673385
Zaloom, C. (2010). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London (1st
ed.). Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
ARJUN APPADURAI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Arjun Appadurai is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture,
and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education,
and Human Development. He is a prominent contemporary social-cultural
anthropologist, having formerly served as Provost and Senior Vice President
for Academic Affairs at The New School in NYC. He has held various
professorial chairs and visiting appointments at some of top institutions in
the United States and Europe. In addition, he has served on several scholarly
and advisory bodies in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and
India. Dr. Appadurai is world renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of
globalization, having authored numerous books and scholarly articles. The
nature and significance of his contributions throughout his academic career
have earned him the reputation as a leading figure in his field. His latest
book is The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso,
2013). He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
RELATED ESSAYS
Heterarchy (Archaeology), Carole L. Crumley
Museum Anthropology (Anthropology), Candace S. Greene
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation (Anthropology), Richard
Handler
The Use of Geophysical Survey in Archaeology (Methods), Timothy J.
Horsley
Ethnography in the Digital Age (Methods), Alan Howard and Alexander
Mawyer
Queer Theory (Anthropology), Martin F. Manalansan
Alternative Polities (Archaeology), Roderick J. McIntosh
Business Anthropology (Anthropology), Brian Moeran
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology (Archaeology), Sarah Parcak
