The guns are silent, the bombers grounded. Millions of refugees pick their way through Germany’s ruined cities, across the scorched earth of Russia, Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine. France and Britain have been deeply shaken; their great empires will soon be only a memory. By contrast, the American economy is just settling down into superpower gear, wheeling out an ever-increasing plenitude of pink Cadillacs, TV sets, film stars and nuclear weaponry. To the East of Europe, the Soviet Union will compete successfully with
‘the free world’ in the production of military hardware, while the production of Cadillacs (pink or otherwise) lags ever further behind.
McCarthy looks for communist spies; Beria looks for capitalist spies. The atmosphere is tense, as people peer into an unprecedented future, which, against the background of the horrors of the recent past, promises progress and Formica kitchens, or threatens with global annihilation.
Not only in the economy, but in most of the sciences as well – including anthropology – the USA was becoming the leading superpower, with more academics, larger research funds, better facilities, more journals and conferences than anywhere else. In the 1950s, academics in countries like Norway, who had hitherto published in German to reach an international audience, switched to English.
The racist views of Nazism had been discredited, and many felt that it was about time to abandon the concept of race in science as well. Almost, but not quite all, geneticists and biologists agreed that racial differences were not comprehensive enough to have any effect on culture. Virtually all social and cultural anthropologists held this view, as indeed they might, since their discipline had since Bastian and Tylor rested on the premise of the ‘psychic unity of mankind’. When international anti-racist proclamations came to be written and signed, it seemed reasonable to involve anthropologists in the paperwork. In this way, a British émigré to the USA, Ashley Montagu (1905–1999), a Boasian with a PhD from Columbia, became the secretary at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) conference about race in 1950.
The resulting document, ‘Statement on Race’, in no uncertain terms proclaimed that biological factors were of negligible importance in shaping human nature.
The winds of change following the Second World War were emphatically universalist; they announced the unity of mankind and equal human rights. To the extent that anthropologists related to this ideological trend – and many did – they were ambivalent. On the one hand, the culturalist, anti-racist views promoted not least by Montagu in a series of popular and influential books were by and large seen as uncontroversial, even trivial. Most anthropologists were probably also in favour of decolonisation, another universalist project. On the other hand, anthropologists steeped in cultural relativism found it difficult to accept the unwarranted missionary zeal seemingly inherent in the new, universalist rhetoric, whether it emanated from anti-colonial movements, the US State Department or the United Nations. In 1947, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) made a lengthy statement, published in American Anthropologist and written mainly by Melville Herskovits, which amounted to a warning against the cultural imperialism ostensibly inherent in the incipient Universal Declaration of Human Rights (AAA 1947). This statement indicates the strong position of the Boasian programme in American anthropology at the time (Wilson 1997; Wilson and Mitchell 2003). But the Americans were not alone.
As late as in 1976, Lévi-Strauss stated that the Western concept of freedom was an historical project without universal relevance. In 1948 he attacked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for being meaningless outside the West (Pace 1986).
Anthropologists were also sometimes co-opted by American government interests, and some delivered strategic knowledge to the CIA. Although far from uncontroversial, these practices – unlike politically radical views – rarely denied anyone tenure.
Shortly after the war, a powerful alternative to the Boasian consensus would develop in the USA. Its obvious debt to Marx was rarely acknowledged explicitly, since being a Marxist in the postwar USA was not a smart move for an academic who wanted tenure and research grants. Instead, its originators tended to look to Morgan as a founding father.
The year 1946 may be seen as a gateway to the lively, expansive period that anthropology now entered. The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth started his studies in that year, in Chicago. Decades later, he describes the atmosphere as electric,
with the university flooded with returning soldiers studying on GI grants, who supplied an influx of new blood into American academia that was unprecedented (Eriksen 2013). It was the year when the British formed the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA), the year when Evans-Pritchard succeeded Radcliffe-Brown at Oxford and Kroeber retired from Berkeley after having taught there for 45 years, and it was also the year in which Julian Steward began to teach at Boas’ old department at Columbia. ‘The revolution’ in the discipline was over, the initial phase of institutionalisation was perhaps over too, and change was again in the air. In the space of a few years, Steward’s neo-evolutionist programme would challenge Boasianism on its home turf; Evans-Pritchard would repudiate structural-functionalism; Gluckman would become professor at the new anthropology department at Manchester, soon to be known for its political radicalism and its interest in social change; and Lévi-Strauss’ great study of kinship, published in 1949, would change anthropology’s discourse on its favourite institution forever.
Although anthropology branched off in many directions in the decades following the war, it also became more tightly integrated than before, thanks to the continuation – and internationalisation – of core debates. Differences remained, but mutual knowledge across national boundaries was becoming more widespread. The annual meetings of the AAA gradually turned into global meetings, and familiarity with each other’s journals was increasingly taken for granted.
It would be futile to impose a simple linear narrative upon the complexities of the two decades following the war. It was a period when the New Guinean highlands replaced Africa as the most fashionable place to go for young fieldworkers, when the Caribbean and Latin America came into their own as ethnographic regions, when structuralism became a power to reckon with, interpretive anthropology had its breakthrough, and new forms of symbolic, political and economic analysis made their entry.
In this book, we have divided our treatment of the 1950s and 1960s into two thematic chapters. The present, and longest, deals with a turn that took place in British and American anthropology, toward the practical, often material, circumstances that are the precondition of social life. The next chapter will deal with an opposite turn, toward symbolic communication and meaning, which was most strongly expressed in France, but had important repercussions for the two other traditions as well. While this editorial separation reproduces a debatable dichotomy between society and
culture, it also highlights divergences and confluences among the evolving national traditions. American anthropology, for a while nearly synonymous with Benedict-Meadean studies of ‘culture’, sprang from an original holistic impulse, a Tyloresque ‘culture’, in which, naturally, both social organisation and the material world played a considerable role. Now, this breadth reasserted itself with the new materialists. French anthropology, which Durkheim had defined in a wide, sociological sense, had, through Mauss, arrived at the fascinating problem of exchange. Exchange, usually thought of in economic terms, can – pace Mauss – be redefined as communication. Enter Lévi-Strauss, and the focus of the discipline seemed to move from sociology to semiotics. Finally, the British, who stubbornly clung to the sociological definition of their subject, once again imported a French theory, as they had done before with Durkheim. There was continuity and change in these movements.
The distinctions between the national traditions began to blur, but were not erased.
NEO-EVOlUTiONiSm AND CUlTURAl ECOlOGy
Although the emergent materialist school in American anthropology was explicitly opposed to Boas, several of Boas’ own collaborators and students were closer to the new thoughts than one might think.
At Berkeley, Kroeber was at least non-committal, and his colleague Lowie even expressed sympathy for the evolutionist project, though his most famous book, Primitive Society (1920), contains a scathing critique of Morgan’s Ancient Society. Like Boas himself, Lowie was primarily a cautious, empirically oriented scholar, with an overwhelming respect for the facts. He was also a learned cultural historian, who rejected Benedict’s ideas of ‘national character’
as vague and speculative, and regarded diffusionism as a more attractive explanation of cultural change than evolutionism, since its assumptions were simpler and easier to test against fact. But Lowie did not reject evolutionism completely. Though he declined to generalise on the subject, he appears to have accepted that cultures, in some cases, evolve along the same general lines, a view ambivalent, if not exactly opposed, to Boas’ historical particularism.
Lowie also introduced the term multilinear evolution, a concept later recycled to good effect by his student, Steward. Contrasting it with the unilinear evolution typical of nineteenth-century anthropology, Lowie held that evolution might proceed along different paths.
Between these paths there were certain rough similarities, but also
considerable variations. When Steward embarked on his project of modernising evolutionism, he could thus draw on his teacher for inspiration and – at least tacit – support.
As Jerry Moore (1997: 166) points out, historical and evolutionist perspectives were more easily accepted in the USA than in Britain, where social anthropology had come to mean synchronous studies exclusively. Social change was not a concern either there or in France, where it would enter anthropology only in the 1960s through the British-inspired work of the Africanist Georges Balandier and his students. And, with the exception of Daryll Forde at University College London, a single, brilliant chapter in The Nuer, and Barth’s 1956 article on ecology and ethnicity in Swat, ecology was also almost completely absent from British anthropology.
When neo-evolutionism came to the fore in the USA in the 1950s, this was largely due to the work of two men: Julian Steward (1902–1972) and Leslie White (1900–1975). Unlike most of his contemporaries, White, who taught for 40 years at the University of Michigan (1930–70), rejected the cultural relativist idea that cultures cannot be ‘ranked’ on a developmental scale, though he also emphatically rejected the moral connotations that the Victorian evolutionists had associated with such schemes. White was interested in general laws of cultural evolution. Like Malinowski, he held a bio-functionalist view of culture but, as he saw it, the function of culture was not to provide individual need satisfaction, but to ensure the survival of the group. His methodological collectivism might remind us of Radcliffe-Brown, but White did not believe in Durkheim’s tenet that societies were autonomous entities with their own, self-sufficient dynamics. Societies were integrated in their ecological surroundings. White distinguished between technological, social and ideological aspects of culture (he was later to add ‘emotional or attitudinal aspects’ – a nod in Benedict’s direction; see Sahlins 1976). The technological dimension was crucial; in fact, he argued that it determined the social and ideological aspects of social life (White 1949).
The originality of White’s theory was modest, although his single-minded technological determinism was often expressed in original ways, as when, in The Science of Culture (1949), he defined the level of cultural development as the amount of energy harnessed by each inhabitant, measured through production and consumption.
Such quantitative ambitions had been absent in nineteenth-century evolutionism and in Boasian cultural anthropology, but would become prominent among the new American materialists.
White’s views met with considerable resistance. More than once, he was identified as a possible Communist during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Among cultural anthropologists, White’s ambition to turn anthropology into an accurate science of cultural evolution and the sociocultural effects of technology, was regarded as irrelevant.
Nevertheless, White developed an excellent department at Michigan, and his students included luminaries like Marshall Sahlins (who later went to Columbia to study with Steward), one of the great figures of late-twentieth-century American anthropology.
Lowie, the crypto-evolutionist, had strong reservations about White’s technological determinism, but encouraged Steward to pursue a version of materialist evolutionism, which, though less deterministic, had much in common with White’s. Steward himself, after completing his PhD at Berkeley – a standard Native American study in the culture-and-personality style – worked as an archaeologist for years, before transferring to Washington, DC, where he directed the Institute of Social Anthropology at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution and edited the seven-volume Handbook of South American Indians, to which the French anthropologist Alfred Métraux made major contributions. Steward refined his theoretical approach during the 1930s and 1940s, and when he arrived at Columbia University in 1946, he brought along a mature theory which provoked his colleagues and inspired his students. During his six-year stay at Columbia (which coincided nearly exactly with Karl Polanyi’s years there), Steward supervised a truly impressive group of graduate students, who were soon to put the mark of a new materialism on American anthropology.
Elman Service, Stanley Diamond, Morton Fried, Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Eleanor Leacock, Marvin Harris, Robert Murphy, Marshall Sahlins, Andrew Vayda, Roy Rappaport and others, all studied under Steward (or under his successor, Fried) and some participated in his many large and ambitious projects.
Steward was dissatisfied with the lack of theoretical ambition among Boasian anthropologists, and, like White, saw a potential for development of general theory in the study of technology and ecological conditions. Like Lowie, however, he was unenthusiastic about unilinear cultural evolution. Furthermore, where White distinguished three cultural subsystems, Steward opposed the cultural ‘core’ to ‘the rest of culture’. The core consisted of technology and the division of labour – which corresponds nicely to Marx’s definition of infrastructure, an influence that Steward, like
White, did not advertise too loudly. It would be their students who made the link with Marxism explicit in the less totalitarian1960s.
Steward’s influence may have been even more powerful in archaeology than in anthropology, but at least three of his contributions have had a lasting impact, particularly on American anthropology. First, Steward founded modern cultural ecology.
Though White, too, included environmental factors in his explanations, Steward regarded the totality of a society and its biological surroundings in roughly the same way as an ecologist regards an ecosystem. He saw society through the eyes of an ecologist.
Adaptation was a core concept with Steward, who searched for institutions that concretely furthered a culture’s survival in a given ecosystem. Some of these institutions were strongly determined by ecology, technology and population density; others were relatively unaffected by material conditions.
Second, Steward developed a theory of multilinear evolution, based on archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidence.
Under particular conditions, such as irrigation agriculture in arid regions, he held that the cultural core would develop along roughly the same lines in different societies. By limiting his generalisations to a few important aspects of the cultures he studied and restricting the scope of his theory to societies with comparable natural preconditions, he succeeded in building up an evolutionism that did not lead to speculative generalisations that could easily be falsified.
Neither Steward nor White regarded all aspects of the superstructure or symbolic realm as materially determined, unlike some of their predecessors as well as successors, Marxist and non-Marxist alike.
Third, Steward was, along with Redfield (whose orientation was definitely non-materialist) an important pioneer in peasant studies.
Peasants (defined as subsistence farmers in complex societies who are partly integrated into non-local economies) have until recently made up the largest population category in the world. The lack of interest in them in pre-war anthropology confirms that the discipline was still hunting for the exotic at the expense of the typical. Steward’s peasant research reached a high point during the large-scale Puerto Rico project he organised in the late 1940s. The project was one of the first area studies in anthropology, and was unique at the time for its integration of local and regional analysis. Here, for just about the first time in the history of anthropology, the nation state and the world market figure actively in the analysis. Steward’s students would continue and refine Steward’s interest in peasant societies in the coming decades, and make decisive contributions in turning
mainstream anthropological attention towards the Caribbean and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
The most important result of White’s and Steward’s theoretical efforts was not their evolutionism, but the interest they inspired in the relationship between society and ecosystem. The emerging school of cultural ecology has often been described as just another form of functionalism, where the ecosystem replaces the social whole as the prime functional imperative. But this critique is only partly justified. The cultural ecologists were interested in cultural change, and, with the passage of time, developed a more sophisticated model of society than their British predecessors. In this, they were assisted by the great advances made in (biological) ecology during the 1950s, particularly as a result of the application of cybernetic models to problems of adaptation. In the 1960s, cultural ecology would prove a diverse source of inspiration among anthropologists. Bateson drew on models and ideas from cultural ecology in his contributions to general systems theory. Clifford Geertz, later known for his Weberian interpretive anthropology, published Agricultural Involution in 1963, a book on Javanese land tenure strongly influenced by Steward. Sahlins, who would also later move towards symbolic anthropology, began his career with several books which elaborated Steward’s (and White’s) interests, and, in a famous article on political leadership in the Pacific, saw the contrast between Melanesian big-men and Polynesian chiefs in evolutionist light, drawing on an analysis of household economy in accounting for political variations. The most consistent (and persistent) of Steward’s and White’s successors was nevertheless Marvin Harris (1927–2001) who, during the 1960s, developed his own brand of materialist evolutionism, which he referred to as cultural materialism (Harris 1979).
The high point of cultural ecology was, perhaps, Roy Rappaport’s monograph Pigs for the Ancestors (1967), which quickly became a classic. Rappaport (1926–1997), a student of Fried’s at Columbia and a friend and associate of Bateson and Mead, carried out fieldwork among the Tsembaga Maring of the New Guinean highlands in the early 1960s. He was particularly concerned with understanding a complex ritual cycle, involving warfare and mass slaughter of domesticated pigs, along with colour symbolism and the ceremonial planting of a rumbim tree. Applying a cybernetically inspired ecological analysis to the ritual, he demonstrates the intimate connections between Tsembaga adaptation to their surroundings (nature, but also neighbouring human groups) and
their worldview. Starting with the White-inspired premise that the availability of energy sources determines cultural adaptation, he ends with a subtle (and non-deterministic) analysis of the aesthetic language through which the Tsembaga conceptualise the ecology they inhabit. Many critics considered the book a kind of ecological structural-functionalism, with little space for individual motivation
their worldview. Starting with the White-inspired premise that the availability of energy sources determines cultural adaptation, he ends with a subtle (and non-deterministic) analysis of the aesthetic language through which the Tsembaga conceptualise the ecology they inhabit. Many critics considered the book a kind of ecological structural-functionalism, with little space for individual motivation