Anthropology, British

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Anthropology, British

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown once said that anthropology has two beginnings: the first in 1748 and the second around 1870. For British anthropology, one could add a third beginning, around 1922, when both Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski began teaching in earnest and published their major field monographs. Radcliffe-Brown’s first date, 1748, marks the first publication, in French, of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Within two years an English edition appeared, and this greatly influenced the anthropological ideas of Scottish writers such as Adam Smith. His anthropological approach, modeled on Montesquieu’s, became known as “conjectural history.” The idea was that speculation and logical deduction, often supplemented by knowledge from early ethnographic reports, should lead us to understand the early history of society.

Institutional anthropology in Britain began in 1843 with the founding of the Ethnological Society of London, which merged with a rival society in 1871 to become the Anthropological Institute. Major publications around that time include Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (published in 1861), J. F. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage (1865), and Sir Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). Maine’s book overthrew the Enlightenment notion of the “social contract” in favor of the family as the basis of society, and it also created the study of kinship as the central interest of the British tradition. One early debate centered on which came first, patrilineal or matrilineal descent? Maine favored the former, while McLennan favored the latter. Tylor’s contribution included his famous definition of culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” ([1871] 1958, p. 1).

Polish immigrant Bronislaw Malinowski began teaching at the London School of Economics in 1922, the year of publication of his Argonauts of the Western Pacific. That book describes the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, where Malinowski spent World War I and where he created the modern style of anthropological fieldwork (working in the native language and through participating in as well as observing daily activities of the people). Meanwhile, Radcliffe-Brown had the year before obtained a professorship at the University of Cape Town. He later moved to Sydney and to Chicago before returning to Britain to take a chair at Oxford University. His major monograph, also published in 1922, was The Andaman Islanders. Together Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown came to emphasize contemporary society over social evolution. Malinowski called this new approach “functionalism,” and the idea was to see how each aspect of society related to other aspects. Radcliffe-Brown shied away from the word, but what others called his “structural-functional-ism” emphasized further the relations between institutions in social systems, the classic four systems being kinship, politics, economics, and religion. He published his collected essays as Structure and Function in Primitive Society in 1952, and his theoretical approach (borrowed partly from Émile Durkheim’s sociology) together with Malinowski’s fieldwork methods became the twin hallmarks of the British tradition. These two men trained the first generation of professional anthropologists (most of the earlier ones having been amateur scholars), and established British anthropology as a great world tradition and the idea of the departmental seminar as the main means of teaching graduate students.

The United Kingdom became the world’s most expansive imperial power in the nineteenth century, and British anthropologists through the first half of the twentieth century took advantage of this. The Malinowskian emphasis on fieldwork encouraged interaction between indigenous populations of the empire and anthropologists, and also between anthropologists and colonial officers. Some of the latter even studied anthropology in British or Commonwealth institutions, and indeed, so too did some residents of the colonies, most famously Jomo Kenyatta, later the first president of Kenya, who did his PhD under Malinowski in the 1930s.

From the 1950s other influences came in. Max Gluckman, from South Africa, and other members of the “Manchester school” that he founded, introduced an interest in conflict and dispute settlement. Fredrik Barth, a Norwegian who studied at Cambridge University, emphasized individual action and fluent group boundaries over rigid social structures. Radcliffe-Brown’s successor at Oxford, Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, pushed against functionalism from another angle. He came to see anthropology as more like the art of history-writing than like the practice of the biological sciences (Radcliffe-Brown’s favorite analogy was “society is like an organism”). Especially in his study of the religion of the Nuer of Sudan, Evans-Pritchard argued that anthropologists should aim to understand things such as religious belief from the native point of view and “interpret” them so they can be understood in one’s own culture.

British followers of the French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss became prominent in the 1960s, especially Sir Edmund Leach. In Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), Leach argued that the Kachin he had lived with before and during World War II exhibited two forms of social organization, one being egalitarian and the other hierarchical. Groups oscillated between the two according to ecological influences, and the political structure too was apparent in the ways in which lineages were related through marriages. Leach, along with Rodney Needham, took to Lévi-Strauss’s “alliance theory” in kinship, and the great battle of the 1960s was between this idea (stressing relations between groups through marriage) and “descent theory” (the older British approach stressing the importance of descent groups). The 1970s saw battles within the alliance theory camp, with Needham and most other British alliance theorists looking to reflect accurately ethnographic realities of what they called “prescriptive” systems of alliance (where one must marry someone of a particular category of kin), whereas French thinkers tended to prefer idealized models far removed from ethnography.

In the 1970s Marxism became a dominant force, with work such as that of Talal Asad critiquing relations that had existed between colonialism and the development of British anthropology. Other British-based anthropologists, including Maurice Bloch, Jonathan Friedman, and Joel Kahn, argued for greater awareness of historical global influences such as colonialism and capitalism on the populations anthropologists work with. Through the 1980s and 1990s the influence of American anthropology further watered down classic British interests, and today there is little difference, except in the way the history of the discipline is construed, between British anthropology and other traditions. That said, British anthropology retains particular strengths in studies of conflict, social development, and kinship (including new reproductive technologies), as well as in ethnographic writing. It also retains strong pedagogical elements from its earlier times, notably the tradition of departmental seminar as a means of teaching and of debate.

SEE ALSO American Anthropological Association; Anthropology; Anthropology, Biological; Anthropology, Linguistic; Anthropology, Medical; Anthropology, Public; Anthropology, U.S.; Anthropology, Urban; Archaeology; Boas, Franz; Culture; Functionalism; Geertz, Clifford; Globalization, Anthropological Aspects of; Race and Anthropology