cultural anthropology

—cultural anthropologist.

the branch of anthropology dealing with the origins, history, and development of human culture, and including in its scope the fields of archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography. Also called social anthropology. Cf. physical anthropology.

[1920-25]

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Branch of anthropology that deals with the study of culture.

The discipline uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography, folklore, linguistics, and related fields in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world. Called social anthropology in Britain, its field of research was until the mid 20th century largely restricted to the small-scale (or "primitive"), non-Western societies that first began to be identified during the age of discovery. Today the field extends to all forms of human association, from village communities to corporate cultures to urban gangs. Two key perspectives used are those of holism (understanding society as a complex, interactive whole) and cultural relativism (the appreciation of cultural phenomena within their own context). Areas of study traditionally include social structure, law, politics, religion, magic, art, and technology.

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Introduction

      a major division of anthropology that deals with the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.

Definition and scope

      Etymologically, anthropology is the science of humans. In fact, however, it is only one of the sciences of humans, bringing together those disciplines the common aims of which are to describe human beings and explain them on the basis of the biological and cultural characteristics of the populations among which they are distributed and to emphasize, through time, the differences and variations of these populations. The concept of race, on the one hand, and that of culture, on the other, have received special attention; and although their meaning is still subject to debate, these terms are doubtless the most common of those in the anthropologist's vocabulary.

      Anthropology, which is concerned with the study of human differences, was born after the Age of Discovery had opened up societies that had remained outside the technological civilization of the modern West. In fact, the field of research was at first restricted to those societies that had been given one unsatisfactory label after another: “savage,” “primitive,” “tribal,” “traditional,” or even “preliterate,” “prehistorical,” and so on. What such societies had in common, above all, was being the most “different” or the most foreign to the anthropologist; and in the early phases of anthropology, the anthropologists were always European or North American. The distance between the researcher and the object of his study has been a characteristic of anthropological research; it has been said of the anthropologist that he was the “astronomer of the sciences of man.”

      Anthropologists today study more than just primitive societies. Their research extends not only to village communities within modern societies but also to cities, even to industrial enterprises. Nevertheless, anthropology's first field of research, and the one that perhaps remains the most important, shaped its specific point of view with regard to the other sciences of man and defined its theme. If, in particular, it is concerned with generalizing about patterns of human behaviour seen in all their dimensions and with achieving a total description of social and cultural phenomena, this is because anthropology has observed small-scale societies, which are simpler or at least more homogeneous than modern societies and which change at a slower pace. Thus they are easier to see whole.

 What has just been said refers especially to the branch of anthropology concerned with the cultural characteristics of man. Anthropology has, in fact, gradually divided itself into two major spheres: the study of man's biological characteristics and the study of his cultural characteristics. The reasons for this split are manifold, one being the rejection of the initial mistakes regarding correlations between race and culture. More generally speaking, the vast field of 19th-century anthropology was subdivided into a series of increasingly specialized disciplines, using their own methods and techniques, that were given different labels according to national traditions. The Table—> shows the terminology current in North America and in continental Europe.

Distinction between physical anthropology and cultural anthropology

      Thus two large disciplines—physical anthropology and cultural anthropology—and such related disciplines as prehistory and linguistics now cover the program that originally was set up for a single study of anthropology. The two fields are largely autonomous, having their own relations with disciplines outside anthropology; and it is unlikely that any researchers today work simultaneously in the fields of physical and cultural anthropology. The generalist has become rare. On the other hand, the fields have not been cut off from one another. Specialists in the two fields still cooperate in specific genetic or demographic problems and other matters.

      Prehistoric archaeology and linguistics also have notable links with cultural anthropology. In posing the problem of the evolution of mankind in an inductive way, archaeology contributed to the creation of the first concepts of anthropology, and archaeology is still indispensable in uncovering the past of societies under observation. In many areas, when it is a question of interpreting the use of rudimentary tools or of certain elementary religious phenomena, prehistory and cultural anthropology are mutually helpful. “Primitive” societies that have not yet reached the metal age are still in existence.

      Relations between linguistics and cultural anthropology are numerous. On a purely practical level the cultural anthropologist has to serve a linguistic apprenticeship. He cannot do without a knowledge of the language of the people he is studying, and often he has had to make the first survey of it. One of his essential tasks, moreover, has been to collect the various forms of oral expression, including myths, folk tales, proverbs, and so forth. On the theoretical level, cultural anthropology has often used concepts developed in the field of linguistics: in studying society as a system of communication, in defining the notion of structure, and in analyzing the way in which man organizes and classifies his whole experience of the world.

      Cultural anthropology maintains relations with a great number of other sciences. It has been said of sociology, for instance, that it was almost the twin sister of anthropology. The two are presumably differentiated by their field of study (modern societies versus traditional societies). But the contrast is forced. These two social sciences often meet. Thus, the study of colonial societies borrows as much from sociology as from cultural anthropology. And it has already been remarked how cultural anthropology intervenes more and more frequently in urban and industrial fields classically the domain of sociology.

      There have also been fruitful exchanges with other disciplines quite distinct from cultural anthropology. In political science the discussion of the concept of the state and of its origin has been nourished by cultural anthropology. Economists, too, have depended on cultural anthropology to see concepts in a more comparative light and even to challenge the very notion of an “economic man” (suspiciously similar to the 19th-century capitalist revered by the classical economists). Cultural anthropology has brought to psychology new bases on which to reflect on concepts of personality and the formation of personality. It has permitted psychology to develop a system of cross-cultural psychiatry, or so-called ethnopsychiatry. Conversely, the psychological sciences, particularly psychoanalysis, have offered cultural anthropology new hypotheses for an interpretation of the concept of culture.

      The link with history has long been a vital one because cultural anthropology was originally based on an evolutionist point of view and because it has striven to reconstruct the cultural history of societies about which, for lack of written documents, no historical record could be determined. Cultural anthropology has more recently suggested to historians new techniques of research based on the analysis and criticism of oral tradition. And so “ethnohistory” is beginning to emerge. Finally, cultural anthropology has close links with human geography. Both of them place great importance on man either as he uses space or acts to transform the natural environment. It is not without significance that some early anthropologists were originally geographers.

Historical development of cultural anthropology

      All human societies have been curious about how their customs originated and what the differences between their own culture and that of neighbouring societies might mean. Thus, in a sense they have all constructed their own anthropologies. But the interpretations put forward, even when they were founded partly on accurate observation, most often remained on the level of myth. Embryonic scientific thought began to appear in only a limited number of centres of civilization: in the classical Mediterranean world, in China, in the medieval Arab world, and in the modern Western world. Only in the West, however, did various ideas converge to bring about the birth of scientific anthropology in the 19th century.

      A characteristic common to all these centres of civilization was the control that they exercised over vast areas and the opportunity that they enjoyed—through their soldiers, merchants, pilgrims, and missionaries—to gather observations on a wide variety of populations. Such a gathering of data was necessary in order even to begin to understand how men adapted to their environments, how they used their various economic, social, and political institutions, and how mankind evolved from simple to complex societies. Historians and philosophers among the ancient Greeks, Arabs, and Chinese all asked such questions. To take only the example of western Europe, many pertinent questions were posed by the French philosophers Jean Bodin (Bodin, Jean) and Michel de Montaigne (Montaigne, Michel de) as early as the 16th century, by the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas) and John Locke (Locke, John) in the 17th, and by the French philosophers Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire in the 18th, to mention only those who are often placed among the precursors of modern anthropology.

19th-century beginnings

      Modern anthropology began to take shape before the middle of the 19th century because of a series of innovations in the Western world. The last great phase of the discovery of the world had begun at the end of the 18th century. At the same time, political and intellectual revolutions had facilitated the questioning of certain religious dogmas, thus opening the way to the discussion of hitherto half-forbidden subjects. The 19th century, therefore, soon saw a revival of interest in and study of the origin of man, the unity or plurality of the human species, and the fixity or mutability of animal species.

      Thus, the science of anthropology developed as an outgrowth of contemporary studies of the classification of human races; of the comparative characteristics of human anatomy; of the history of human settlements; of the classification of languages and the comparison of grammars; of the comparison between primitive and ancient societies; and of the historical development of man's economy and industry. Finally, about 1840, a principle for the study of human facts was proposed: the concept of evolution. This was even before Charles Darwin (Darwin, Charles) had published his celebrated Origin of Species (1859). This concept, arising in strong debates, provided the starting point for anthropology.

Evolutionism

      Almost to the end of the 19th century, evolutionism determined the complexion of the new science. A major task of cultural anthropology (cultural evolution) was thought to be that of classifying different societies and cultures and defining the phases and states through which all human groups pass—the linear interpretation of history. Some groups progress more slowly, some faster, as they advance from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the irrational to the rational. It suffices to quote an American anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan (Morgan, Lewis Henry):

As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress (Ancient Society, 1877).

      Other quotations from a Scotsman, John F. MacLennan (McLennan, John Ferguson), or an Englishman, Edward B. Tylor (Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett), would take the same position.

      Cultural anthropology, then, set out to analyze the totality of human culture in time and space. But by assuming a linear conception of history, it too often neglected the discontinuities and interferences of concrete history. Morgan, and particularly Tylor, however, sometimes felt the necessity of introducing the concept of the “diffusion,” or spread, of cultural characteristics from one people to another—thus suggesting that characteristics could develop independently and converge and that a people could leap over “stages” of evolution by borrowing knowledge from others. Moreover, because it based itself on a theory that all mankind had a similar psychic outlook or that something called “human nature” was universal, anthropology also failed to take into account the fact that the same cultural trait can mean different things depending on the society in which it is found.

Marxism and the collectors

      At the same time, in the second half of the 19th century another kind of evolutionism developed, that of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Engels, Friedrich). Partly independent of anthropological evolutionism (Marx's Critique of Political Economy dates from 1859), partly linked to it (Engels' most important work appeared after Morgan's Ancient Society and made use of it), the Marxist (Marxism) theory laid stress on the causes of human evolution. A society was defined by its mode of production, on which its political, juridical, and ideological superstructures were allegedly based. These superstructures continued to exist after the mode of production had changed; and in the conflict that followed, this contradiction opened the way to a new type of society. Numerous anthropologists have taken the Marxist analysis into account, even if only to retain its historical view and to reject its economic determinism.

      During this same period, especially toward the end of the 19th century, the tales of missionaries, traders, and travelling adventurers included an abundance of miscellaneous information that was collected in such works as Sir James Frazer's (Frazer, Sir James George) Golden Bough (1890) and Ernest Crawley's Mystic Rose (1902). These rather encyclopaedic collections of customs, religious and magical practices, and other curious data were read with relish by the intellectual community; the theories that accompanied the collections were equally appreciated by evolutionary-minded anthropologists, as the theories were meant to establish an evolutionary sequence of magical, religious, and scientific thought, using the data as evidence.

20th-century trends

      By the beginning of the 20th century, many cultural anthropologists had already begun to turn toward what might be called a more pluralistic viewpoint. To account for the variety of societies and cultures and the broadening of the differences that separated them, they suggested taking the total circumstances of each human group into account by considering the whole of its history, the contacts that it had had with other groups, and the favourable or unfavourable circumstances that had weighed on its development. Such a view was distinguished by a marked relativism: each culture represented an original development, conditioned as much by its social as by its geographical environment and by the manner in which it used and enriched the cultural materials that came to it from neighbours or others (through “diffusion”) or from its own creativity (through “invention” and “adaptation”).

Boas and the culture history school

      Cultural anthropology was also diversifying its concepts and its areas of research without losing its unity. Franz Boas (Boas, Franz), a German-born American, for example, was one of the first to scorn the evolutionist's search for selected facts to grace abstract evolutionary theories; he inspired a number of students—Ruth Benedict (Benedict, Ruth), Alfred L. Kroeber (Kroeber, A.L.), Margaret Mead (Mead, Margaret), and Edward Sapir (Sapir, Edward)—to go out and seek evidence of human behaviour among people in their natural environs, to venture into the field to gather facts and artifacts and record observable cultural processes. Consequently he is known as the founder of the so-called culture history school, which for much of the 20th century dominated American cultural anthropology.

      Beyond this emphasis on field work and first-hand observation, it may also be said that Boas inclined toward what was called functionalism or the functional approach—an approach based on sociological theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that tended to liken societies to living organisms or machines, with interdependent parts. In the words of Melville J. Herskovits (Herskovits, Melville J.), one of Boas' students,

the functional view, attempts to study the interrelation between the various elements, small and large, in a culture. Its object is essentially to achieve some expression of the unities in culture by indicating how trait and complex and pattern, however separable they may be, intermesh, as the gears of some machine, to constitute a smoothly running, effectively functioning whole (from Man and His Works, 1948).

      Boas insisted upon this method of considering any single culture as a whole. Finally, by emphasizing the importance of collecting life histories, he drew attention to the problems posed by connections between culture and personality.

Mauss and the “sociological” school

      In a similar way, Marcel Mauss (Mauss, Marcel), in France, influenced the characteristic tendencies of a whole generation of European sociologists and cultural anthropologists, including Alfred Métraux (Métraux, Alfred) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss, Claude), and founded the Institute of Ethnology of the University of Paris; he also influenced such men as the noted British cultural (or social) anthropologists Bronisław Malinowski (Malinowski, Bronisław) and Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown (Radcliffe-Brown, A.R.). In general it may be said that Mauss, like Boas, was insistent upon studying social phenomena as a system—but in a slightly different fashion. Like many others of his time he conceived of systems as self-regulating or equilibrium-seeking, composed of elements that operate to maintain the integration or adaptation of the system. Mauss gave impetus, in fact, to what was called structuralism or the structural approach, which focussed more on society as an indivisible social organism than on society as an interrelation of individuals (the functionalist's emphasis). Like Boas, Mauss also tried to twin culture and personality—that is, cultural anthropology and psychology.

The “grand diffusionists”

      The large and influential American school of “culture history” anthropologists led by Boas should not be confused with a distinct and smaller group of Austro-German diffusionists, led by Fritz Graebner (Graebner, Fritz) and Wilhelm Schmidt (Schmidt, Wilhelm), who constituted what has been called the “culture-historical” school in Europe. These latter, too, rejected classical 19th-century evolutionism, but they were nevertheless inclined toward painting grand theories—principally the theory that out of a few ancient cultural centres or civilizations, born quite separately, there had developed the array of cultures existing today. Diffusion, or the spreading of culture traits, in their view, was the prime force of human development, and all cultural development could be traced to a few inventive centres. Because they termed these original centres Kulturkreise (Kulturkreis), (or “cultural clusters”), they were also known as the Kulturkreise school of cultural anthropology. This kind of pseudo-history was carried to even greater lengths by a British group of diffusionists, led by Grafton Elliot Smith and William J. Perry (Perry, W.J.), who even named a single fountainhead of all cultural development—Egypt.

functionalism and structuralism

      Some schools of research that began to develop between the two world wars more or less vigorously rejected the historical approaches, sometimes denying any interest in them whatever. According to the cultural functionalists, including the followers of Malinowski, the only way to explain facts was to define the function that they performed currently in a given culture. The aim of all cultural anthropological research, they held, should be to perceive the totality of a culture and the organic connection of all its parts. Consequently, comparison did not make sense: each culture was a unique reality. History, moreover, made no more sense; a culture was to be interpreted at one point in time, as if the age and the origin of the elements composing it were without importance. The only thing that counted was the function the elements performed now. Earlier cultural anthropologists had talked of “survivals,” customs or other cultural traits that survived from out of the past though no longer with any real function or meaning. But Malinowski would say, “There are no survivals”; everything current, according to the functionalists, has some function.

      Whereas the name of Malinowski is supremely associated with the school of functionalism, the name of Radcliffe-Brown is known as one of the most important proponents of present-day structuralism. Relying on the concepts of formal mathematics and linguistics, Radcliffe-Brown and other structuralists tried to determine whether in cultural anthropology it was possible to reveal that which “suggests the character of a system” beyond empirical reality and which “alone is the true object of science” (Lévi-Strauss). A structure is not a sum of social relations, which are only the primary material from which the observer extracts “structural models.” A structure is a system of which the members of the society being studied are not aware or only partly so. The model that the cultural anthropologist constructs from the system is valid when the model's operation can account for all the observed facts. This exacting approach has proved particularly useful in studying kinship and marriage relations as well as myths. The difficulties of using this approach in other fields, as well as the fact that historical changes are difficult to include in this sort of static analysis, strengthen the objections that many workers in the field have raised against it.

Cultural psychology

      One development of the interwar period led certain cultural anthropologists to speak of a new subdiscipline, cultural psychology, or ethnopsychology, which is based on the idea that culture conditions the very psychological makeup of individuals (as opposed to the older notion of a universal psyche or human nature). In the 1930s, for instance, in her studies of the American Southwest, Ruth Benedict found that the ways in which the Pueblo Indians thought and reasoned were strikingly different from the ways in which their immediate neighbours thought and reasoned, even though their geographical environment was virtually identical. Her conclusion was that each culture over the ages had evolved and given to its members a unique “psychological set” or orientation toward reality and that this set actually determined how the members saw and processed information from the environment. Culture, in effect, affects the ways in which the mind works.

      Studies in culture and personality have developed in many directions. Research into forms of child rearing, for instance, have called in question the universality of Freudian propositions concerning parent-child relationships. There have been many studies of value systems, which give a culture what has been called its “configuration,” or of the personality types prized or rejected by each culture, or of the “national characteristics” of certain modern societies. The results of these studies have, however, been uneven in quality.

Neo-Marxism and neo-evolutionism

      Finally, certain theoretical tendencies of the 19th century came back into favour. For political reasons, Soviet cultural anthropologists conducted their research in the tradition both of Marxist analysis and of a fairly rigid evolutionism. Even their choice of subjects was sometimes linked to official ideology—as, for example, a program of religious anthropology aimed expressly at the “elimination of religious prejudice in the Russian population.” Elsewhere, in France, for example, a brand of neo-Marxism has influenced a new generation of cultural anthropologists to concentrate on analyses of primitive economies. Classical evolutionism, meanwhile, has been revived in the United States by some cultural anthropologists who speak of “multilinear evolutionism” or many paths to modernization.

Status of contemporary cultural anthropology

      It is true that cultural anthropology has not reached a state of complete coherence. This is clear from the persistence of divergent national traditions and from the way in which research can be impregnated with explicit or implicit ideologies. It is also true that different schools of thought coexist in the same country and that cultural anthropology is not therefore based on a unified body of concepts, whereas a science is defined above all as a homogeneous language for interpreting a specific level of reality. A “science” of culture would seem possible only if anthropologists could free themselves of ethnocentrism and produce concepts and other elements that were universal, objective, and theoretically significant. The functionalists think they have fulfilled these conditions. The structuralists challenge this and, in their turn, try to fulfill the conditions. Thus cultural anthropology—as opposed, for example, to linguistics—has developed only very partially a terminology independent of a national or private language. These limitations are still encountered by most of the social sciences. But cultural anthropology's primary aim—to permit cross-cultural comparability—makes the problem even more serious.

The new research and fieldwork

      Cultural anthropology is undergoing a crucial test of another kind. Its traditional objects of study—“primitive” or “traditional” cultures—seem to be disappearing. Either they are dying out because they find it impossible to adapt themselves to a modern world or they are transforming under the direct or indirect influence of modern industrial societies. Moreover, those that do remain at a folk level often take exception to being placed among societies that are the subject of anthropological study, seeing this as a manifestation of condescension and a vestige of domination.

      Much cultural anthropological research and study has entered the library or laboratory. One of the criticisms of Boas and others engaged in pure fieldwork was that they were collectors rather than systematizers. There is thus a considerable wealth of ethnographic data to be analyzed, collated, classified, and interpreted in order to be made useful. Files of information are being arranged in what are called Human Relations Area Files. More and more typologies are being constructed, typologies based on political systems or technology, or systems of kinship. In addition, new readings of the material are being attempted in the hope that mathematical formulations or models might be obtained. Also emerging is the study of insufficiently known societies by techniques of simulation.

      Many cultural anthropologists refuse to turn to the laboratory and continue to do fieldwork, either among Western populations or among modernizing, formerly colonial populations. They are joined in this task by researchers native to those populations. For some anthropologists these field studies provide an opportunity for a true anthropological experiment, determining how people respond to modernizing influences and how elements of the old culture evolve into those of the new. Such anthropologists tend to reject the concept that social systems seek integration and “equilibrium.” Instead they propose a more “dynamic” interpretation of traditional societies and emphasize the role played therein by tensions and conflicts.

      In any case, at a time when the problems of development are among the primary cares of the world, a growing number of anthropologists are devoting themselves to research the results of which can be used in political policy and decision making—whether they are employed directly by interested governments, or lent by foreign governments or international organizations, or recruited by foundations for study and development.

Non-Western cultural anthropologists

      A significant development in the latter half of the 20th century has been the emergence of more and more non-Western cultural anthropologists. Originally, cultural anthropology was a Western interest and endeavour, and it has continued to be dominated by Westerners. Even in non-Western countries where anthropology institutes and university departments have begun to multiply somewhat—as in Japan, India, and some Latin-American nations—cultural anthropologists have remained rather constricted. Japan is a good example. Cultural anthropology as an independent science there is still young, having arisen largely only since World War II; and most Japanese cultural anthropologists in the schools have had to be hybrid teachers, attaching themselves to sociology or social science departments and teaching sociology or some other related discipline in addition to cultural anthropology. Not only have cultural anthropology courses been few but also funds for field studies have been limited, so that there have been few lengthy and intensive studies; what research there has been has focussed largely on Japanese or other East or Southeast Asian communities. Furthermore, Japanese cultural anthropologists have shared a problem faced by many non-Western researchers, in that the native language in which they write has not been as readily accessible to foreigners as have been western European languages. “International communication,” the Japanese cultural anthropologist Takao Sofue has noted, “has [thus] been seriously restricted with the result that Japanese scientists have been isolated from effective criticism from abroad” (“Social Anthropology in Japan,” American Behavioral Scientist, 12:15–17, Jan.–Feb. 1969). It has also meant, of course, that they have not been sufficiently widely read abroad to make their influence felt. This problem, though, is not so serious in non-Western countries like India, where a European language constitutes a major language of scholarly communication.

Applied studies

      From the cultural anthropologist's point of view, applied studies—that is, research meant to give practical aid and guidance to governments and other organizations—have in many ways been an undoubted gain. Concerned as they so often were with the effects of social change, applied studies offered the nearest approach to the controlled experiment in the social sciences. The specialized inquiries greatly deepened the knowledge of particular aspects of primitive society and culture, especially of economic and political organization, land tenure, and law. The scientific value of such research apart, work in the applied field also offered to many anthropologists the purely human satisfaction of aiding backward peoples in their struggle to meet and master the forces of Western civilization.

      The concrete gains derived by colonial governments were more difficult to assess, partly because the officials were not bound to act upon the cultural anthropological findings and partly because the value of the findings was not always wholeheartedly accepted. Sometimes, it is true, the cultural anthropologist found himself embarrassed by the excessive confidence of his employers that he had the key to all problems. More often, the employers were inclined to question whether cultural anthropology was in fact as helpful and the information it provided as indispensable as enthusiasts would make it out to be. Some impatience was felt with the “academic” cultural anthropologist who would insist on comprehensive studies when only some specific information was asked for, or who seemed to deal in a complicated fashion, using complicated language, with issues that to the practical man appeared straightforward. To all this cultural anthropologists could reply that, though the knowledge they sought was not indispensable to government, it facilitated informed and smooth government.

      But cultural anthropologists also had to face another, more disturbing criticism—that they overemphasized the importance of tradition and were hostile to modern development. Nor was this view limited to colonial administrators; educated Africans and Indonesians openly expressed their distrust of a science the primary interest of which was in “primitive” peoples and which might play into the hands of reactionaries and upholders of “colonialism.”

      If these objections did not promise too well for the future of applied cultural anthropology, cultural anthropologists themselves had grown more cautious. They came to fear that the applied work might entice too many of the younger cultural anthropologists away from general and theoretical research, so that the very progress of the discipline might be endangered. Conversely, the man fully committed to applied work, like the permanent government cultural anthropologist, would be in danger of losing touch with universities and academic centres, and hence with the advances achieved in his discipline. He would turn into a mere technician, perhaps still useful to his employers but no longer truly representing anthropological knowledge.

      There were graver problems of an ethical nature. A change of roles is forced upon the cultural anthropologist when he is consulted on the best way to implement government policies. To be sure, he might see no cause for disagreeing with the policy, and the best way of imposing it might well be understood to be the one best serving the interests of the native peoples. Even so, the cultural anthropologist, in abandoning the point of view of the scientist, must pronounce upon the merits and demerits of particular courses of action and thus introduce value judgments. Nor will the issues always be clear-cut and uncontroversial; in that case the cultural anthropologist might have to take sides and argue from his own political and moral convictions. And if his recommendations had little chance against administrative considerations or the dictates of “higher policy,” personal frustrations would be added to the dubiousness of his position.

      On the other hand, if the cultural anthropologist presented his facts without adding recommendations or warnings, he would be furnishing information that might be put to uses with which he could not in good conscience agree. Or again, he might be tempted to restrict his advice to the most efficient means for achieving certain ends, dismissing the ends themselves, the policy to be implemented as not of his concern—which would hardly diminish his ethical commitment.

      All these issues were widely and on occasion heatedly debated among cultural anthropologists. In an attempt to clear the air the Society for Applied Anthropology published in 1951 a carefully worded code of ethics. It appealed to the social conscience of the individual research worker and to his responsibility at all times to uphold the moral tenets of civilization—respect for the individual and for human rights and the promotion of human and social well-being. Not all cultural anthropologists were prepared to endorse this assumption of a moral mission on the part of the “disinterested” scientist. The dilemma, then, though vital for the future of applied cultural anthropology, remained unresolved.

Paul Mercier Ed.

Additional Reading

Histories of anthropological science include T.K. Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology, 3rd ed. rev. (1965), which covers all of anthropology; and P. Mercier, Histoire de l'anthropologie (1966), which covers only cultural anthropology. The principal textbooks are M.J. Herskovits, Man and His Works (1948); F.M. Keesing, Cultural Anthropology: The Science of Custom (1958); and J. Poirier (ed.), Ethnologie générale (1968). In cultural anthropology—aside from two works by the “fathers” of the discipline, L.H. Morgan, Ancient Society (1877); and E.B. Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilisation (1881)—some of the classic general works are Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), and Race, Language and Culture (1940); Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, and Other Essays (1944); A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952); A.L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today (1953); Claude Levi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (1958; Eng. trans. 1963); G. Balandier, Anthropologie politique (1967; Eng. trans. 1971); and M. Mauss, Oeuvres (1968). Studies of individual peoples that have become classics include W.H.R. Rivers, The Todas (1906); M. Granet, Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine (1919; Eng. trans., Festivals and Songs of Ancient China, 1932); Bronislaw Malinowski, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935); A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (1922); Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928); Franz Boas, The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians (1930); R.F. Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific (1932); R.W. Firth, We, the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (1936); M.J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938); E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (1940); and E.R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (1954).

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