Anthro People Flashcards
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1895–1975)
Russian literary critic whose work has become increasingly important since his death. Bakhtin criticized the static and formal ideas of structural linguistics, emphasizing instead the fluidity and contingency of language in use. Key concepts such as the idea of the dialogical, and the notion of heteroglossia, have been taken up in post-1970s anthropology. Works include Rabelais and his World (1965; English translation 1968) and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1934–35; English translation, 1981).
Asad, Talal (1932–)
Saudi-born anthropologist and postcolonial theorist, brought up in Pakistan and trained in Britain. In the early 1970s Asad was one of the first to cast a critical eye on the colonial history of anthropology. Since moving to the US in the 1980s his genealogical approach to the conceptual language of anthropology and the ideological presuppositions of Western modernity has been inceasingly influential, especially for anthropologists of religion. Key works include Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (2003).
Barthes, Roland (1915–80)
French literary critic whose work in semiotics has been influential for structuralist and poststructuralist anthropology. Works include Mythologies (1957).
Benedict, Ruth Fulton (1887–1948)
Student and close associate of Franz Boas, Benedict is most remembered as the foremost proponent of the culture and personality school in the United States. Her version of psychological anthropology was based on the notion that cultures were characterizable by standardized personality types. These ideas were widely propagated in the popular Patterns of Culture (1934), while her remarkable study of Japanese character, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) remains influential despite the fact that it was composed with no first-hand ethnographic experience of Japan itself. In the 1930s she was active in the intellectual battle against scientific racism. See culture, race.
Blacking, John (1928–90)
British ethnomusicologist who did field research with Venda in South Africa. In How Musical Is Man? (1973), he argued a humanistic and social interpretation of music that has been influential in ethnomusicology.
Boas, Franz (1858–1942)
German-born anthropologist who emigrated to the United States in 1887. There he developed his own school of anthropology which advocated a rejection of conjectural history, especially evolutionism, in favour of empirical research into the detail of culture and the variation between cultures. His work was of paramount importance in developing the relativist tradition which has dominated American anthropology through much of its history. His teaching at Columbia University became the basis for that tradition. He carried out fieldwork among Inuit and Kwakiutl. Works include Anthropology (1907), Race, Language and Culture (1940), and Kwakiutl Ethnography (1967). For further details, see main entry.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1930–2002)
French sociologist who did fieldwork with the Kabyle and published extensively on Algeria and France. His prominence in anthropology rests on his Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972; Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977; reworked as La logique de la pratique, 1980; The Logic of Practice, 1990), in which he developed a critique of structuralism, from the point of view of practice and strategy, introducing the notion of habitus to an anthropological audience. His work on France has been more obviously sociological, but his study of class and consumption La distinction (1979; Distinction 1984) has been highly influential in the anthropology of consumption. See also regional comparison.
Butler, Judith
(1956–) American poststructuralist philosopher and social theorist, whose work has been especially important in feminist anthropology. Her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), drew attention to the performative dimension of gender identity. Her later work concentrates on the body, on theories of the subject, and most recently on ethics.
Chomsky, Noam
(1928–) American linguist and political activist. Although his linguistic theories have developed through the years, his work has consistently emphasized the innateness of linguistic ability. Many anthropologists have sought inspiration in his work, with reference to both universal grammar and the deep structures of particular languages. However, Chomsky has distanced himself from these attempts, on the grounds that language and culture are not really analogous. Among his most important works for anthropologists is Language and Mind (1968), while his most enduring theoretical treatise in linguistics is Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (1965).
Clifford, James
(1945–) Literary critic and historian of anthropology. In his early study of the work of missionary-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt, Clifford began to question the authority of ethnography as a representation of true ‘native’ culture. This paved the way for postmodern, dialogical attempts to define culture as relational rather than merely as an object of anthropological enquiry. Co-editor (with George Marcus) of Writing Culture (1986).
Comte, Auguste
(1798–1857) French philosopher and naturalist and one of the founders of sociology (a term he invented), a sociology which included what would now be considered social anthropology. He advocated an approach characterized by positivism (also his term) and was among the earliest to advocate a notion of social evolution as a phenomenon analogous to biological evolution. His positivist sociology was an influence on, among others, Durkheim and Tylor. Works include the Cours de philosophie positive, (6 vols, 1830–42), of which the fourth volume (1839) deals with sociology.
Deleuze, Gilles
(1925–95) French poststructuralist philosopher whose theoretical influence has grown since his death. Friend and associate of Foucault, his explicit influences included Nietszche and Spinoza, both celebrated for their ‘anti-systemic’ and ‘non-totalizing’ inspiration. The two volumes of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (with Félix Guattari, vol. I, 1972; vol. II, 1980, translated respectively as Anti-Oedipus, 1977, and A Thousand Plateaus, 1987), with their talk of ‘nomads’ and ‘rhizomes’, have been a rich source of metaphors for anthropologists and cultural geographers.
Derrida, Jacques
(1930–2004) French literary theorist and philosopher. His De la grammatologie (1976; Of Grammatology, 1976) represents an important attack on the foundations of structuralism, and his strategy of deconstruction has been important in destabilizing anthropological (and other) assumptions about language and meaning. See postmodernism.
Durkheim, Emile
(1858–1917) The founder of modern French anthropology and sociology, influenced by Comte and Spencer, and himself an influence especially in the French and British traditions. He sought to establish sociology as a distinct field of enquiry and consistently argued against the reduction of ‘social facts’ to non-social explanations. His early works, such as De la division du travail social (1893; The Division of Labour in Society, 1933), Les règles de la méthode sociologique (1895; The Rules of the Sociological Method, 1938) and Le suicide (1897; Suicide, 1951), introduced the notions of collective consciousness and collective representation, as well as the distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. His later works, such as Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1915), were more concerned with problems of religion and the sociology of knowledge, and drew much more heavily on recognizably anthropological sources. He gathered a group of dedicated students around him, including his nephew Marcel Mauss, publishing the results of their work in the journal Année sociologique. This collective body of work set the intellectual agenda for much of what was to follow in French anthropology, as well as in British anthropology, where it was particularly important in the work of Evans-Pritchard and his associates in Oxford. Steven Lukes’s Émile Durkheim (1973) is an excellent guide to Durkheim’s ideas and their influence.
Engels, Friedrich
(1820–95) German businessman and revolutionary who spent most of his working life in England. Although more generally known for his political and intellectual collaboration with Karl Marx, Engels’s importance in anthropology is based on his influence on the Marxist and feminist traditions through his Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staates (1884; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1902), essentially an elaboration on L.H. Morgan’s Ancient Society. See family, gender, Marxism and anthropology.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
(1902–73) British anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in East Africa in the 1920s and 1930s and later, as professor of social anthropology at Oxford, became the foremost British anthropologist of his generation. In his first major work, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937), made a powerful case for the internal coherence and rationality of apparently alien modes of thought; the book is still a primary point of reference in philosophical arguments about rationality and relativism. In The Nuer (1940), he pioneered an ecological, as well as a structural, approach though the former was largely ignored by subsequent generations of his followers. This book and his subsequent Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951) could be seen as developments within the functionalist tradition, as well as anticipating aspects of structuralism, but from his appointment to the chair in Oxford onwards, he displayed growing disenchantment with Radcliffe-Brown’s project for a scientific anthropology, preferring instead the model provided by humanities disciplines like history. With the series of articles that culminated in Nuer Religion (1956), he demonstrated his concern with what he described as the ‘translation of culture’. Evans-Pritchard was knighted in 1971, and in his last years he advocated a return to diffusionism, much to the chagrin of his closest colleagues. Among Evans-Pritchard’s other important works are The Sanussi of Cyrenaica (1951), The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology (1963), Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), The Position of Women in Primitive Societies and Other Essays (1965), The Azande (1971) and Man and Woman among the Azande (1974). See British anthropology.
Fabian, Johannes
(1937–) Polish-born and American-trained anthropologist who did fieldwork on religious movement and popular culture in what was then Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo) in the 1970s. Since then he has been known especially for his critical evaluations of ethnographic writing and the history of anthropology. Important books include Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983), Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (2000) and Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays (2001).
Foucault, Michel
(1926–84) French philosopher and historian. His work on topics such as the history of psychology, medicine, penology, and sexuality has been enormously influential across the human sciences, encouraging critical attention to the genealogy of modern humanism, and a deep suspicion of liberal assumptions. In particular, his arguments about power and knowledge, and the production of modern subjects, have been used in feminist anthropology, medical anthropology, in the critique of Orientalism, and in the emerging anthropology of resistance. Works include Les mots et les choses (1966; The Order of Things, 1970) Surveiller et punir (1975; Discipline and Punish 1978), and Histoire de la sexualité (3 vols, 1976–84; The History of Sexuality, 1979–90). See postmodernism, power.
Frazer, Sir James
(1854–1941) A classicist who wrote sublimely and extensively on early religion and kinship. In a sense his work represents a survival from the nineteenth century, the product of the last great ‘armchair’ evolutionist. Although popular in many quarters it was attacked by new generations of fieldworking social anthropologists. Ironically, it is partly to Frazer that we owe the label ‘social anthropology’, as this was the title of the honorary professorship bestowed on him by the University of Liverpool. His style was much praised, and it is said that Malinowski took up anthropology after turning to The Golden Bough (originally 2 vols, 1890, later expanded to 12 vols) to improve his English. It is also said that the fieldwork revolution initiated by Malinowski, consigned Frazer and his works to anthropological oblivion. Yet The Golden Bough has remained in print for over a century, and has exerted real influence over literary figures like T.S. Eliot. Other works include Totemism and Exogamy (4 vols, 1910) and The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead (2 vols, 1911–13). See classical studies, kingship, magic.
Freud, Sigmund
(1856–1939) Austrian physician and the founder of psychoanalysis. Most anthropologists associate him with his Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo, 1950). In its closing pages he suggests, somewhat polemically, that human society began with the overthrow of ‘father right’ by a primeval band of brothers who sought to commit incest with their mother. His argument is significant for its insistence that the desire to commit incest is natural, and its prohibition a major determinant of culture. Freud’s more general arguments have influenced the development of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, and American symbolic anthropology, as well as the relatively small number of psychoanalytic anthropologists like Devereux and Roheim. See psychoanalysis.
Geertz, Clifford
(1926–2006) Highly influential American cultural anthropologist. After graduate school at Harvard, he taught at Berkeley and the University of Chicago, before becoming the first (and only) anthropologist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. He carried out fieldwork in Java, Bali and Morocco, and published important studies of religion (The Religion of Java, 1961), cultural ecology (Agricultural Involution, 1963), Islam (Islam Observed, 1968), and the fictions of ethnographic writing (Works and Lives, 1988). But it is for his essays, especially those collected in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) that he is best known. His theoretical position derives from Max Weber, or that version of Weber promulgated by Talcott Parsons, with additional influences from American culture and personality anthropologists, literary theorists like Kenneth Burke, and philosophers such as Ricoeur and the later Wittgenstein, all melded in a baroquely inimitable prose style. Above all Geertz is credited with advancing the idea of anthropology as a kind of interpretive or hermeneutic practice, concerned to elicit what he called ‘thick description’. See symbolic anthropology.
Goffman, Erving
(1922–82) Canadian-born sociologist who emphasized the analysis of everyday events. He did fieldwork in the Shetland Islands and in a mental hospital in Washington, DC. His most important works are The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Asylums (1961).
Gramsci, Antonio
(1891–1937) Italian Marxist theorist and political activist, who died as a prisoner of Mussolini’s fascist regime. In his Prison Notebooks (published in English in 1971) he developed a version of Marxist theory which emphasized the cultural mechanisms of class domination, through an analysis of processes of hegemony within civil society. His ideas were important in the development of cultural studies, and have been widely employed by anthropologists interested in issues of power and resistance.
