Excellent Overview of a Complex Field
When you start out studying anthropology, you usually get hit from all sides with a plethora of ideas and “classic” works you must read. You become aware that anthropologists have been writing since the late 19th century, though there were related texts (in some way) stretching back to antiquity. But if you are in a university, the professor will talk knowingly about current work as well. You hear about all kinds of theories, with different defining names, that boost or dismiss previous work endlessly. It’s quite confusing. And it depends whether your institution is in the USA, in the UK, or in Europe. (What to say of Asia, Latin America, or Africa?) Once-separate national traditions of anthropological direction have intertwined to a large degree, but older, more diverse trajectories still exist to some extent. Lots of controversies have risen and disappeared, others still remain. How to make sense out of all this? Who were the creators of anthropology in the past? What approaches did they take? Where did they work and how did they do what they did? You can try to read your way through oceans of text, from author to author, but good luck with that, you’d better be young, otherwise you won’t live long enough to reach the end.
Or---you can read this book! I’m really pleased I bought it. It’s the best summary of the whole field I’ve ever found, written very clearly with a minimum of jargon by two Scandinavian professors. It explains the foundations of the field, tells of the lives and work of a few of the most famous scholars, but supplies the objections that others had to their work. You can read how British, French, and American approaches really differed at first, but over the years began to cross-fertilize. It tells how anthropology did or didn’t mesh with colonial rule in the British and French cases, and how Americans saw anthropology as a way to preserve what they thought were dying cultures of North America. From Malinowski to Margaret Mead, from Gluckman to Geertz, all the famous names appear. Let’s not forget the 1960s graduate student hero, Claude Levi-Strauss. You will perceive, along with the authors, that anthropology can never be a science; it’s an art form. From the view of culture as functional, anthropologists moved on to analysis of structure, especially kinship, and then by the 1960s, more to symbolism and the inner aspects of culture. It’s a long history full of the names of authors and trends, but it’s all here, put together in a very understandable form. Marxism, feminism, modernism and post-modernism are stirred into the mix towards the end. If you emerge finally without a better understanding of how anthropology arrived at its present condition, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.