History of Anthropology
ANTH 665100
Institute of Anthropology
National Tsing Hua University
Fall Semester, 2010-2011 Academic Year
(Discussion Draft)
Instructor
James Wilkerson 魏捷茲
Office C617, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
(03) 571-5131, ext. 4526 (O)
(03) 572-1678 (H)
wei.jiezi@msa.hinet.net
Time and Place
Mondays, 6:00 am to 9:00 pm; Room C304, College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Course Description
History of Anthropology explores ideas and practices in the discipline of anthropology over time. The period covered is mainly the second half of the Nineteenth Century, when the core ideas of anthropology came together, and the first half of the Twentieth Century, when anthropology became an institutionalized discipline. Along the way, this course also teaches students how to access library and new media resources, how to read scholarly articles and books, and how to write critiques and literature reviews.
Requirements
Course requirements include the following: (1) regular class attendance (normally a maximum of two unexcused class absences for the semester) and energetic participation in course discussion, (2) written critiques (see below), and (3) presentations of written summaries and critiques (schedule to be decided in class).
Readings. The vast majority of the readings are original works that are or once were particularly influential in anthropology (and are, largely, available in Chinese translation). The reading load is heavy, but I will introduce students to techniques for how to handle a heavy reading load (which is usual for courses of this kind and life in anthropology in general).
Summaries and Critiques. The only written work requirement for this class are the written summaries and critiques. The class will agree on the schedule of summaries and critiques at the first class meeting. Each student will present some summaries and critiques according to the schedule and some as decided by the course instructor on the day that critique is due. Each summary or critique will be about 1500 characters (about three pages of double spaced text). Critiques are due at 9:00 am sharp. Late work is not normally accepted.
Grading
The minimum requirements for a passing grade is to come to class, talk, and write the critiques. Scores of between seventy and seventy-five indicate a minimal understanding of course content and the grades indicate that the students should talk with the course instructor. Scores of between seventy-six and eighty-five indicate a competent understanding of course content, but where the student still has room for improvement on certain points. Scores of between eighty-six and ninety indicate that the critique makes a significant scholarly contribution and is publishable with revision. Scores above ninety indicate that the work both makes a significant scholarly contribution and is of publishable quality in a refereed professional journal.
Schedule
| Week | Dates | Weekly Topics |
| 1. | 13 September | Getting Acquainted |
| 2. | 20 September | What is a Critique? |
| 3. | 27 September | What is Intellectual History? What is Anthropology? |
| 4. | 4 October | The Invention of Kinship and Society |
| 5. | 11 October | Religion and Culture |
| 6. | 18 October | Emile Durkheim |
| 7. | 25 October | Max Weber |
| 8. | 1 November | Karl Marx and Frederich Engels |
| 9. | 8 November | Boas and American Ethnology |
| 10. | 15 November | Mauss, Hertz, and the Rest of Anné Sociologique |
| 11. | 22 November | Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and British Social Anthropology |
| 12. | 29 November | China’s Anthropology |
| 13. | 9 December | American Anthropologists Studying Themselves Abroad |
| 14. | 6 December | British Anthropologists in Colonial Oceania and Southeast Asia |
| 15. | 13 December | British Anthropologists in Colonial Africa |
| 16. | 20 December | TBA |
| 17. | 27 December | Concluding Discussions |
Weekly Readings
Recommended readings are marked Items with an asterisk (e.g. *). Masters program students should read the recommended readings in areas of special interest or importance to their individual study program. Students in the doctoral program should make themselves familiar with as many of the recommended readings as possible. The course instructor will make other arrangements for any undergraduate students to insure that readings are not overwhelming.
Week One. Getting Acquainted
No readings and no critiques. The course instructor distributes and explains the course syllabus and introduces the course goals. Next, there is a discussion of the importance of the intellectual history of anthropology in graduate study in general and in graduate study in anthropology in Taiwan and at National Tsing Hua University. The class discusses and decides on the particulars for the critiques.
Week Two. What is a Critique?
Each student is asked to give a five- to ten-minute trial oral critique of one the required readings. The purpose is for students to begin to experience the written critique genre. Kuper’s (1982) and Wagner’s (1974) articles play a dual role. First, both articles illustrate the importance of the history of anthropology plays in contemporary anthropology. Secondly, both articles are particularly clrear examples of what is required for writing a successful critique. At the end of class, technical aspects, including but not only style standards, of scholarly writing are also briefly introduced.
Kuper, Adam
1982 Lineage Theory: A Critical Retrospect. Annual Review of Anthropology 11:71-95.
Wagner, Roy
1974 Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands? In Frontiers of Anthropology. Murry J. Leaf, ed. Pp 95-122. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company.
Week Three. What is Intellectual History? And What is Anthropology?
Students will write a trial critique on either the Phillip Kuhn volume or the George Stocking article. The trend in intellectual history over the last half of the Twentieth Century has been away from describing intellectual lineages and toward understanding both the internal and external dynamics driving theoretical innovation (or stagnation). Phillip Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a foundation canon in intellectual history that continues to exert an important impact upon intellectual history in general and the history of anthropology in particular. This influence has itself been a source of reflection within the history of anthropology. George Stock’s “On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences” is, in turn, a foundation text on the role of intellectual history within the behavioral sciences. A fruitful comparison can be made of the position Stocking takes in this early article with his position in more recent writings.
Kuhn, Phillip
1970 [1962] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second edition, enlarged. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (This work is available in Chinese.)
Stocking, G. W.
1982 [1968] On the Limits of “Presentism” and “Historicism” in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences. In Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. Pp 1-12. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Week Four. The Invention of Kinship and Society
Students will write their first graded critique on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society. Two key concepts in the history of anthropology are kinship and society. For a large part of the history of anthropology, kinship and society were almost synonymous. Lewis Henry Morgan was a pivotal figure in the formation of both concepts in anthropological theory. (This point is amply clear in Adman Kuper’s article “Lineage Theory” [1982, see above]). Ancient Society is but one of his works, but is useful because it concludes a line of thought begun in his earlier writings and because it became a foundation canon in both Western anthropology and Marxism. The course lecture will trace out the major intellectual and political currents present when Morgan was “inventing” kinship and reconfiguring “society” as an anthropological concept.
Morgan, Lewis Henry
1975 [1877] Ancient Society. Palo Alto, CA: New York Labor News. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
*Maine, Henry
1972 [1861] Ancient Law. New York, NY: Dutton.
*Beider, R. E.
xxx The Grand Order of the Iroquois: Influences on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ethnology. Ethnohistory 27:349-60.
*Trautmann, Thomas R.
1987 Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Week Five. Religion and Culture
Whereas the previous weeks was primarily concerned with the concepts of kinship and society, this week is concerned with the complimentary concepts of religion and culture. Like kinship and society, religion and culture are in many respects treated as virtually synonymous in Nineteenth Century Anthropology. Again, whereas the causal relationship between kinship and society, on the one hand, and religion and culture, on the other hand, went from the former to the later, in Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City this causality is reversed. The issue of causality eventually becomes critical in the work of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Additionally, there is the issue of whether religion and culture are to be interpreted in universalistic or particularistic terms. This latter point become clear when Fustel de Coulanges position on religion is compared with that of Edward Bennet Tylor and James G. Frazer. Even more, my own personal take on Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City is to zero in on how he treats ritual knowledge and performance as a form of property and property as never complete without its symbolic aspect. This latter point of my own suggests there are ways in which Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City is a work of remarkable continued relevance to anthropological theory.
De Coulanges, F.
1900 [1864] The Ancient City: A Study of the Religious and Civil Institutions of Ancient Greece and Rome. London, England: Lee and Shepherd. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
Tylor, Edward Bennet
1979 Animism. In Reader in Comparative Religion. William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, eds. Fourth edition. Pp 9-18. Fourth edition. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Frazer, James G.
1979 Sympathetic Magic. In Reader in Comparative Religion. William A. Lessa and Evon Z Vogt, eds. Pp 337-351. Fourth edition. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
*Smith, William Robertson
1972 [1889] The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institution. New York, NY: Schocken Books.
*Finley, M. I.
1977 The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond. Comparative Studies in Society and History 19(3):305-27.
*Douglas, Mary
1996 Children Consumed and Child Cannibals: Robertson Smith’s Attack on the Science of Mythology. In Myth and Method. Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger, eds. Charlottesville, Virginia: The University of Virginia Press.
*Frazer, J. G.
1911-1915. The Golden Bough. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
*Ackerman, Robert
1987 J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
*Leach, E.
1966 Frazer and Malinowski: On the ‘Founding Fathers’. Current Anthropology 7: 560-576.
Week Six. Émile Durkheim
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life was the last volume published in Émile Durkheim’s own lifetime. In his own estimation, the volume occupied a special place in the evolution of his thinking. Other social scientists similarly give the volume a special position in the history of thought in the social sciences, though the reasons for giving the volume a special position differs greatly. I see Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (hereafter Elementary Forms) to have many of the marks of mature Franco-Anglo ethnographic writing. This is probably not accidental. First, virtually every anthropology graduate student reads Elementary Forms and thus it is one of the few foundation canons that the anthropology community shares in common. Secondly, the foundation canons of modern ethnographic writing written and published shortly after the publication of Elementary Forms handle the relationship between theoretical argument and ethnographic description in ways similar to Émile Durkheim in Elementary Forms. This class explores in particular the social and political undercurrents that influenced how Émile Durkheim handled the relationship between theoretical argument and ethnographic description. Another important topic of discussion is how Durkheim conceived of the relationship between society and culture and especially in specific terms of his concept “collective representations.” Though there are many fine secondary writings on Émile Durkheim, Steven Lukes' Émile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study and Ivan Strenski’s Durkheim and the Jews of France are, for different reasons, especially important.
Durkheim, E.
1965 [1912] The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York, NY: The Free Press. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
*Lukes, Steven
1973 Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study. New York: Harper and Row.
*Strenski, Ivan
1997 Durkheim and the Jews of France. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
*Allen, Nicholas J.
1995 The Division of Labor and the Notion of Primitive Society: A Maussian Approach. Social Anthropology 3(1):49-59.
*Douglas, Mary
1996 Children Consumed and Child Cannibals: Robertson Smith’s Attack on the Science of Mythology. In Patton, Laurie L. and Wendy Doniger, eds., Myth and Method. Virginia: The University of Virginia Press.
*Jones, Robert Alun
1977 On Understanding a Sociological Classic. American Journal of Sociology 83(2):279-319.
1981 Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17(2):184-205.
1984 Robertson Smith and James Frazer on Religion: Two Traditions in British Social Anthorpology. In George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthroplogy. History of Anthropology 2. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
*Nye, D. A. and C. E. Ashworth
1971 Emile Durkheim: Was He a Nominalist or a Realist. The British Journal of Sociology 22(2):133-148.
*Stocking, George W., Jr.
1984 Dr. Durkheim and Mr. Brown: Comparative Sociology at Cambridge in 1910. In George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology. History of Anthropology. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
*Wallwork, Ernest
1984 Religion and Social Structure in The Division of Labor. American Anthropologist 86(1):43-64.
Week Seven. Max Weber
It would be enough to include Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a counterpoint to Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. Be this as it may, the importance of Max Weber in general and his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in particular are of critical importance in what is now called, by Marshal Sahlins in Islands of History, the “structure of conjecture” (that is, ,“…the practical realization of the cultural categories in a specific historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historic agents, including the microsociology of their interaction”). Weber’s privileging of the cultural over the social and the situating of both within a historical process is self-consciously in opposition to a Marxist position. I would argue, in hindsight, that contemporary anthropology ethnography suggests unexpected harmonies between Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Karl Marx’s Capital. This class meeting on Max Weber again pays attention to how the social and political issues of his time carried over into his writings. Of special importance here are the issues surrounding the state. Time permitting, I will add in additional material on German nationalism and its relationship to the formation of German ethnology.
Weber, M.
1985 [1904-5] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London, England: Counterpoint.
*Käsler, D.
1988 [1979] Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.
Week Eight. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels
This year I have not made Maurice Bloch’s very useful Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship a required reading. However, any student who looks forward to the doctoral program or is a doctoral student really must read this book. The book does an excellent job of showing the continuities of both Franco-Anglo anthropology and Marxism with Lewis Henry Morgan’s writing,. It also describes how the emphasis in each tradition almost immediately went their separate ways and only began to be openly reconciled over the past half century. Still, in a sense, Lewis Henry Morgan, and indeed, Marxism, were unnamed parties in a certain dialogue that was taking place within Franco-Anglo anthropology. For example, this is a critical issue, as is covered in the discussion of Marcel Mauss’ The Gift and of both W. H. R. Rivers and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown given below, in Franco-Anglo anthropology. In the case of Frederick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, the debt to Lewis Henry Morgan is made explicit. This work has become a foundation canon in gender studies. Its relationship to the Nineteenth Century woman’s suffrage movement is also obvious. Less obvious is its importance for subsequent critiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Elementary Structures of Kinship, where the Marxist tradition and the Franco-Anglo tradition first begin a renewed dialogue.
Engels, Frederick
1902 [1884] The Origin of the Family. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr and Co. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
*Bloch, Maurice
1985 [1983] Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
*Shaw, William H.
1984 Marx and Morgan. History and Theory 23(2):215-28.
McLellan, David
1995 [1973] Karl Marx: A Biography. London, England: Papermac.
Week Ten. Boas and American Ethnology
American anthropology is both part of and separate from the Franco-Anglo as well as the German tradition of anthropology. Beginning with Boas and American ethnology, the processes of the institutionalization of anthropology takes a new turn. The process of institutionalization had already started in both England, Fance, and Germany, but with American anthropology the drive toward institutionalization took on a different urgency. That urgency, as indicated in Franz Boas’ “Race and Character.” Boas’ work and the American ethnology he helped found had to do with a peculiarly American dimension of anthropology: racism. The discussion of Boas and American ethnology resembles other discussions of the emergence of anthropology as a discipline insofar as it cannot be separated from Western colonialism. The discussion of Boas and American ethnology is perhaps unique, however, insofar as the central place that racism, and immigration, has historically played in the institutionalization of anthropology in the United States.
Boas, F.
1940 Race and Character. In Race, Language and Cuture. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Week Ten. Mauss, H ertz, and the Rest of the Anne Sociologiquee
The French school of sociology is important to all of the social sciences rather than just anthropology. However, the generation which followed Émile Durkheim are better known within the discipline of anthropology than, for instance, in sociology. By far the two central figures in the generation following Émile Durkheim are Marcel Mauss and Robert Hertz. One died in the second world war, the other spent the rest of his life carrying the burden of his dead. This class meeting discusses the legacy of the French school of sociology as a continuation and yet as an extension of Émile Durkheim’s sociology. Especially important is the contribution of these students to the work of the master. Also important are the ways in which Émile Durkheim’s efforts were modified. Special emphasis will be given to three topics. The first is Marcel Mauss’ The Gift. That volume is a foundation canon in anthropology whose influence not only looks forward to contemporary anthropology, but also backward into a retoflexive discussion of Durkheim’s The Division of Labor. The Gift is about exchange in pre-capitalistic society and thus compliments and extends Karl Marx’s Capital. Robert Hertz, for his part, extends upon Émile Durkheim’s attempts to identify the species-wide grounds of human culture. This not only included his discussion of issues relating to cultural classification, but also to issues relating to the sociocultural reproduction of society in the face of individual death. Finally, a point of continuity between both the lines pursued by Mauss and Hertz is that of sacrifice. Hertz obviously benefited from Mauss, but so did Durkheim. The target for Durkheim’s original writings is William Robertson Smith. This class meeting will, time permitting, discuss in depth the anthropological issues of sacrifice, Judism, and French politics at the turn of the century.
Mauss, Marcel
1990 [1925] The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
*Hertz, Robert
1960 [1909] A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death. Rodney and Claudia Needham, trans. In Death and the Right Hand. Rodney Needham, ed. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
*Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
1960 Introduction. In Death and the Right Hand. Rodney Needham, ed. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
*Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss
1964 [1898] Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
*Mauss, Marcel
1985 [1938] A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self. In Michael Carrithers et al, eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude
1987 [1950] Introduction to the Works of Marcel Mauss. Longdon, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
*Douglas, Mary
1990 Forward: No Free Gifts. In Marcel Mauss’ The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W. W. Norton.
*Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
1965 Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
Week Eleven. Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and British Social Anthropology
Malinowski, Bronislaw
1961 [1922] Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesin New Guinea. New York, NY: E. P. Dutton. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
*Stocking, G. W., Jr., ed.
1984 Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology. History of Anthropology. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
*Kuper, A.
1983 [1973] Anthroplogy and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Week Twelve. China’s Anthropology
TBA
Week Thirteen. American Anthropologists Studying Themselves Abroad
Benedict, Ruth
1946?. The Chrysanthenum and the Sword. xxx:xxx. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
Week Fourteen. British Anthropologists in Colonial Oceania and Southeast Asia
*Bateson, Gregory
1958 [1936] Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Cutlure of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Second edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Leach, E.
1965 [1954] Political Systems of Highland Burma. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (This volume has a Chinese edition.)
Week Fifteen. British Anthropologists in Colonial Africa
*Evans-Pritchard, E. E.
1940 The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
*Turner, Victor
1996 [1957] Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Oxford, England: Berg.
Week Sixteen. Concluding Discussions
No readings. This class meeting returns to the issues first introduced at the beginning of the course. An important emphasis is to locate Taiwan anthropology in relationship to the history of anthropology in general.
General Recommended Readings
Clifford, James and George E. Marcus
1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
Marcus, George E. and Michael J. Fischer
1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Geertz, Clifford
- Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, California: California University.
Handler, Richard
1999 Raymond Williams, George Stocking, and Fin-de-Siècle U.S. Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology13(4):447-463.
Kuper, Adam
1993 [1973] Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. Third edition. London: Routledge.
Fabian, Johannes
1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Stocking, George
1987 Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press.
Stocking, George
1992 The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Stocking, George
1995 After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
