Anthropologists and the

History of Anthropology
1
Adam Kuper
Brunel University

In 1962 the Social Science Research Council in the USA sponsored a con-
ference on the history of anthropology. Citing Dell Hymess account of the
meeting, Regna Darnell remarked that:
Anthropologists... were simultaneously flattered by the attention of his-
torians of science and disturbed by differences between their presumably
objective accounts and the oral history of anthropology handed down by the
elders of the discipline. The dilemma, and it is one which persists in the
history of anthropology, is who shall write the history, anthropologists or
historians? (Darnell, 1977: 339)

The dilemma was sharpened as professional historians increasingly

moved in on the anthropologists, two landmarks being John Burrows
Evolution and Society (1966) and George Stockings Race, Culture and
Evolution (1968). Interest was growing in the history of all the human
sciences, and historians began to specialize in particular disciplines-the
history of anthropology being simply one speciality amongst several. And
it was more and more clearly a subdiscipline within the history of science
rather than within anthropology.
This was quite as it should be, at least according to Stocking, who
has become the doyen of the field. His influential essay On the Limits of
&dquo;Presentism&dquo; and &dquo;Historicism&dquo; in the Historiography of the Behavioral
Sciences criticized the established tradition of practitioners histories.
These were characterized as typically presentist or Whiggish in orien-
tation, casting back into the past to legitimate current theoretical argu-
ments, trivially obsessed with the identification of founder figures, even, in
the worst case, writing history as a triumphant progression to the truth,
fully revealed at last by the author himself. The sins of history written
Critique of Anthropology © 1991 (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New
Delhi), Vol. 11(2): 125-142.
125

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&dquo;for the sake of the present&dquo; were listed portentously in an alphabetically

ordered catalogue: anachronism, distortion, misinterpretation, misleading
analogy, neglect of context, oversimplification of process (Stocking, 1968:
8). This was certainly a weighty indictment, though arguably overgeneral-
ized. I would be prepared to defend both the classic histories of anthro-
pology, those by Haddon (1910) and Lowie (1937), from most of these
charges.
The purist, historicist approach which Stocking advocates is now prob-
ably the orthodoxy among historians of the social sciences. It also guides
some of the best work on the history of anthropology written by profes-
sional anthropologists, such as the fine essays of James Urry. Nevertheless,
in an interesting essay provocatively entitled In Defense of Presentism,
David L. Hull, a philosopher and historian of biology, urged the claims of
the historians readership. Histories are written not only by people and
about people but also for people, Hull points out. The people about
whom a history is written lived in the past, but the historian and his readers
live in the present. No purpose is served by pretending otherwise (Hull,
1989: 209). The historian necessarily brings a knowledge of the present to
the study of the past: a knowledge which is perhaps particularly salient in
the history of science. Moreover, the historians interlocutor must also be
allowed to shape the history. There is a three-way traffic, between the
historian, the evidences of the past and the interests and knowledge of the
reader.
The reader also has a choice, as Hull remarks, and if the historian
austerely refrains from tracing the theoretical lineages of current scientific
orthodoxies, for fear of sinning against the canons of historiography, then,
for their part, scientists may not wish to bother with the real history of
their discipline, inevitably a messy chronicle of failures, errors, blind alleys,
political apologetics and other bits and pieces of what might appear to be
(from their point of view) mere antiquarianism. They might even adopt as
their motto a statement attributed to A.N.Whitehead: A science that
hesitates to forget its founders is lost (though it should be recalled that
Whitehead was also the author of Science and the Modern World (1926),
one of the most influential, theoretically driven essays on the
history of
science).
In any case, the audience for much of the history of anthropology which
is now being written is still composed very largely of practitioners; and

Stocking, for one, clearly assumes that he has something of value to offer
to them. Indeed, he argues that history must be of particular importance to
practitioners of the behavioural sciences, since these disciplines are still, in
Kuhnian terms, pre-paradigmatic.

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 127

Because they are pre-paradigmatic, the various competing schools of the

present and of the past exist in a sense contemporaneously. But because they
have on the whole such notoriously short historical memories, the behavioral
sciences of the present have very little awareness that their predecessors
were in many instances asking questions and offering answers about prob-
lems which have by no means been closed. And because of the disciplinary
fragmentation of approaches which were in the past often much more in-
tegrated, there may be fruits of interdisciplinary cooperation which are as
easily picked in the past as in the present. (Stocking, 1968: 10)
The anthropologist, then, may benefit by reading the history of the dis-
cipline over the shoulders of historians, but Stocking assumes that this his-
tory should be written by historians, and perhaps in the first instance for
historians.
Yet it could be argued that if the various competing schools of the pre-
sent and the past exist in a sense contemporaneously, then presentism
may not be so objectionable after all. Many anthropologists will prefer to
read those contemporaries whom they think are talking sense, and perhaps
the same preferences can safely be extended to encompass our forebears.
Those who got things wrong may be better ignored.
Tim Ingold, for one, the current editor of Man, takes this sort of line,
seeing little point in studying ancestral figures who did not anticipate cur-
rent concerns. He turned down a paper of mine with the explanation that:

I want Man to be a forward-looking journal, and although that does not rule
out explorations in the history of anthropology, I am interested in such his-
tory in so far as it prepares the ground and points the way into the future.
I did not feel your article did that: it seemed to dwell on past episodes of
British Social Anthropology for their own sake, charting developments in
both anthropology and psychology which have ultimately proven to be some-
thing of an intellectual cul-de-sac.
He was kind enough to enclose a review he had written on my Invention of
Primitive Society, which was dismissed on similar grounds as an account
of the remote past, at least from the point of view of a contemporary
theoretician-It is impossible to read Kupers account without being
struck by the remoteness of the controversies he relates from contem-
porary discourse. Ingolds review ends with an appeal for what he terms
the real [his emphasis] history of anthropology that has made it what it is
today ... a history not of specific constructions of primitive social organ-
ization, but of ideas about the very nature and conditions of human social
life and culture (Ingold, 1989: 400-3).
Taking the view that predecessors should be treated effectively as
though they were writing for our immediate benefit, Ingold wants to read

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 128

only the sort of history which

Stocking believes should not be written.
However, though evidently presentist he is no Whig. Indeed, he thinks
a
that our ancestors were often more acute than ourselves, writing:

Anthropologists have as short a memory as the practitioners of any other dis-

cipline and are inclined to spend much effort groping towards conclusions
already elaborated by their predecessors, in incomparable prose, a long time
ago. For this reason I have considered it just as important to look closely
at what these authors actually said, as to keep abreast of the latest trends.
(Ingold, 1986: x)
If I might sum up Ingolds prescription in a slogan, he is encouraging us to
treat our ancestors as contemporaries. Not all our ancestors, but those who
were on the right lines, the lines which we favour ourselves.
In short, our forebears are either our contemporaries or they are of
purely antiquarian interest. This is a position which has a respectable
ancestry, and probably commands substantial support. Even as histori-
cally minded an anthropologist as Evans-Pritchard could take a similar
view, concluding his Theories of Primitive Religion with the dismissive
observation that: For the most part the themes we have been discussing
are, for anthropologists at least, as dead as mutton, and today are chiefly
of interest as specimens of the thought of their time (Evans-Pritchard,
1965: 100).
Nor is it necessarily simply philistine and scientistic to insist that the past
need not be approached historically. After all, this is what E.M. Forster did
so famously in Aspects of the Novel (1927), which he began with the state-
ment that Time ... is to be our enemy, and proposed: We are to visual-
ize the English novelists not as floating down that stream which bears all
its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a
circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room-all writing their
novels simultaneously (Penguin edition, 1962: 27). There is little to be
gained, he argued, from historical contextualization. All through history
writers while writing have felt more or less the same. They have entered a
common state which it is convenient to call inspiration, and having regard
to that state, we may say that History develops, Art stands still (1962: 36).
This brisk treatment of our ancestors is not without a certain appeal, but
its attractions must fade somewhat in the face of the most evident lesson
of the history of anthropology, which is that current orthodoxies tend to
be rather short-lived, often being replaced by programmes completely
neglected the day before yesterday, though they may have been generally
accepted a little longer ago, or somewhere else. Ingold, indeed, recognizes
this, even toying with a cyclical notion of intellectual history. [Cynically, it

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 129

could be said that the way to keep a step ahead of everyone else is to go
back and reread the works of those who were writing in the period just
after the one modern scholars are currently (and unwittingly) recapitula-
ting (Ingold, 1986: X)].2 Adherence to a cyclical theory should greatly
complicate presentist judgments, unless the cycle is fairly relentless, but
Ingold nevertheless seems confident that we-or at least he-now know
which cycles are extinct, and which will recur.
My own view is very different. I cannot share Ingolds confidence that
the real issues of anthropology have now at last been definitively identi-
fied, if not settled, and that they can therefore be allowed to determine the
internal historical consciousness of the discipline. History need not focus
the past from the viewpoint of the present, but may rather refocus the pre-
sent itself, obliging us to see current views in a fresh, often unexpected,
even disturbing perspective. History may make the present seem troub-

lingly inconsequential rather than comfortingly inevitable.

II

In short, I would prefer the prescription of Collingwood (who was both an

archaeologist and a philosopher of science), which Bruce Trigger, for in-

stance, cites in the introduction to his recent history of archaeology, that
no historical problem should be studied without studying... the history
of historical thought about it (Trigger, 1989: 2; citing Collingwood, 1939).
Yet even if this historical directive is honoured, the result need not be to
consign the history of anthropology to historians, nor to anthropologists
who are prepared to suspend their theoretical concerns. The readers will
still require a certain relevance, and consequently a practitioner may even
enjoy an advantage over the outside historian, unless the historian has
an exceptionally good technical grasp of the field. The point is worth em-

phasizing, since historians and philosophers who pay attention to our

affairs can seldom resist the temptation to make their own contributions
to anthropological theory. (I could cite numerous instances, but selective
name-calling is invidious. Those with a taste for the invidious, may, how-
ever, consult Kuper, 1985.)
But the opposition between anthropologist and historian is perhaps
largely artificial. The parallels between historical and ethnographic re-
search are very evident. The past is a foreign country, L.P.Hartley wrote:
they do things differently there.3 Modern ethnographers write historically
about the societies they study, and many modern historians have drawn on
ethnographic models and deploy anthropological theory: none more so,

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 130

perhaps, than historians of science. Presentism may be simply the histori-

cal equivalent of ethnocentricism, and Hallowell was surely correct when
he argued that anthropologists who write naively presentist history are fail-
ing as ethnographers and not only as historians (Hallowell, 1965).
Today, studying other cultures, anthropologists typically explain cus-
toms and forms of action by contextualizing them, by evoking a matrix
of institutions or beliefs which makes sense of particular practices, or by
relating a complex of ideas or activities to a cultural tradition. Studying
their own tradition, they may proceed in a similar way. An outstanding
exemplar is Louis Dumont, who has written intellectual history as an
anthropologist, but without privileging the history of anthropology.4He
constructs a Western tradition of economic and political theory which
he contrasts with the Indian tradition that he studies as an ethnologist, in
order to bring out underlying structural attributes of both. The ultimate
objective is to provide us with a perspective on our own assumptions, as
a necessary preliminary to the pursuit of scientific comparison. As he puts
it, to isolate our ideology is a sine qua non for transcending it, simply
because otherwise we remain caught within it as the very medium of our
thought (Dumont, 1977: 27).
Most anthropologists are less bold. More typically, an anthropologist is
simply concerned to situate a particular theory or method in time or place.
Quite commonly a new theory or method in anthropology is of foreign
provenance: it comes from another discipline, or from a tradition of thought
which is not familiar. As it is domesticated, so it is interpreted. This hap-
pened, for instance, when Levi-Strausss writings were taken up by British
and later by American anthropologists. There was a good deal of exegesis
which placed the writings in a tradition of thought going back on the one
hand to Saussure and on the other to Mauss, and which explicated such
culturally puzzling episodes as Levi-Strausss dispute with Sartre.
More recently, there have been attempts to show that Levi-Strausss
enterprise can be understood better if other contexts are invoked. Almeida
(1990) has brought to light the place of mathematical metaphors in Levi-
Strausss work, which he relates to other intellectual movements in the
1940s, especially the cybernetics of Von Neumann, the decision theory
of Morgenstern and the mathematics of Bourbaki, suggesting a completely
fresh reading of some of his fundamental texts. I resuscitated Levi-Strausss
dialogue with Frazer on cross-cousin marriage, in the hope that this would
clarify what the problem was that he was trying to solve in The Elementary
Structures of Kinship (1949) (Kuper, 1988; Ch. 11). What began as ethno-
graphic contextualization-in the hands, for instance, of Leach and Need-

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ham, the original interpreters of Ldvi-Strauss in Britain-becomes a

historical pursuit with the same purpose.
Such commentaries attempt to make better sense of a theory or an
approach in anthropology; to contribute to its translation and so, perhaps,
to its assessment and incorporation in another project. Biographies can
provide more elaborate vehicles for such contextualization, and there has
recently been a flurry of biographies of leading anthropologists, a notable
example being Regna Darnells biography of Sapir (Darnell, 1989). An
ambitious and sophisticated group biography of postwar French social
anthropologists has been produced by Gerald Gaillard (1988). It is a model
of its kind, providing an essential context in which this protean tradition
5
can be better understood.5
Such a construction of an intellectual tradition may also take a critical
form. Radical accounts of anthropological traditions drew attention to the
dubious political purposes which the discipline is supposed to have served.
The uncontentious lesson here is that we should become conscious of the
political uses of our work, the contentious message being that our work
should serve proper political purposes.
An obvious example is the series of critiques of colonial anthropology
which derive from the work of Edward Said, such as the volume Anthro-
pology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad. They stimulated
useful debate, in the course of which the colonial influence on anthropol-
ogy came to be understood in a more sophisticated and nuanced way.
A perhaps less familiar instance is Murderous Science, an account of
eugenics in Nazi Germany by Benno Muller-Hill, a German geneticist,
who was moved to investigate the history of his discipline because he could
not get straight answers to troubling questions. He implicates in the mur-
derous Nazi project, among others, Konrad Lorenz, who was awarded a
Nobel Prize after the war, and who is still much cited by some contem-
porary anthropologists, and the ethnographer Eugen Fischer, one of the
leading anthropologists in Germany. It troubles me that a similar service
has not been provided for German ethnology: particularly since attempts
by young scholars to fill this gap have been effectively sabotaged by some
of their seniors.
Another type of critical history restricts itself to intellectual, internal
matters and attempts a theoretical critique of a whole tradition of research.
Leslie Whites (1966) essay on the schools of Boas and Radcliffe-Brown
was written in order to promote the materialist, evolutionist anthropology
which White himself favoured. On the assumption that the triumph of the
anti-evolutionists was not due to their intellectual merits, he presented a

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132

sociological explanation to account for it. He also stimulated interest in the

unfashionable evolutionist tradition by writing historical essays on Morgan
and editing some of his diaries (White, 1957). Another similar but much
more ambitious project, Marvin Harriss Rise of Anthropological Theory

(1968), had essentially the same intent: to revive the evolutionist project,
in part by criticizing its triumphant rivals, in part by recalling its history.
This sort of polemical history certainly requires technical competence in
the field. In contrast, Langhams attempt to write an historical critique of
Melanesian and Australian kinship studies (1981) was undermined by his
amateurish kinship analyses.
On a small scale I attempted something similar to White in an essay
which tried to explain why the British tradition of social anthropology, as
it developed from the 1930s onwards, was so hostile to psychological ex-
planations of ethnographic materials. This antipathy is conventionally
attributed to the influence of the Durkheimian paradigm in British social
anthropology. The taboo on psychology takes a different significance,
however, when it is shown that for the first twenty years of the century
British anthropology was very largely in the hands of psychologists and
physiologists-notably Rivers, Haddon and Seligman-and that other
leading psychologists-including Bartlett and McDougall-were active for
a while in anthropological research. Moreover, in the United States the

anthropologists were very sympathetic to psychological theories in the

1930s, and indeed the major thrust of American research in this period was
the study of culture and personality. It seems rather likely that the recoil of
the social anthropologists from psychology-matched in Britain by a sharp
movement of the psychologists away from social psychology or psycho-
analysis-was fuelled by political considerations, having to do with the
professionalization of British psychology and competition with American
anthropology.
Speaking for myself, I found that this discovery helped me to deal with
the feelings about psychology imbued by early socialization into British
social anthropology. Publication of this argument may help others to bring
into question inherited lines of specialization. Of course, these might
equally well be breached by straightforward argument, but I would expect
that an understanding of this background would help to prepare the way.6
Critical accounts of anthropological traditions may also be more specifi-
cally problem-focused. Popperian historiography recommends that a tradi-
tion of explanation should be attacked at a strategic point. Ian Jarvie-a
firm Popperian-organized his Revolution in Anthropology (1964) as a con-
frontation between two traditions in anthropology, the Frazerian, and its
successor, the functionalist. Defending Frazerian anthropology, as he de-

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 133
fined it, against the father-murderer, Malinowski, Jarvie offered polemical-
historical accounts of the two traditions and of a Popperian alternative,
and then offered a test: competitive explanations of cargo-cults formulated
in the different idioms available.
R.H. Barness Two Crows Denies It: A History of Controversy in Omaha
Sociology (1984) is an historical contribution to the debate on Crow-
Omaha terminologies and their sociological implications. He is concerned
with the history of Omaha ethnography, which he traces from the first re-
ports through to Dorseys classic study in 1884, the source of most second-
ary commentary, and on to modern times, paying particular attention to
the history of the ethnographies themselves, the ethnographers, and
where possible their informants, his aim being to provide a criticism of
sources insofar as the documents are pertinent to specific analytic ques-
tions (Barnes, 1984: 3-4).
His conclusion is two-fold. First, in contradiction to the postmodernists
who were soon to introduce their own sceptical relativism to these debates,
he reported that notwithstanding plain differences in style and preoccu-
pations of the ethnographers, which sometimes lead to conflicting pictures
of Omaha culture, the basic features of that culture nevertheless come
through in all reports ... ethnographic facts impose themselves sufficiently
to prove that the facts are not merely the imaginative creations of the an-
thropologists (Barnes, 1984: 234).
This critical reliance on the sources allows Barnes to reconstruct the
Omaha system at different periods. His reconstruction leads him to his
substantive conclusion, that the kinship system of the historical Omaha
does not accord with any of the orthodox views of the Crow-Omaha type.
Consequently his study becomes a critical challenge to the tradition of
theorizing which is associated with such typologies of kinship systems.
A heavily publicized recent instance of Popperian attack is Freemans
critique of Margaret Meads study of Samoa. Most of Freemans Margaret
Mead and Samoa (1983) is, of course, devoted to a detailed review of some
ethnographic issues-the emotional development of Samoan infants, the
virginity of Samoan girls, the aggression of the men, and so forth. The issue
here is whether Meads descriptions of Samoan life in a popular book publ-
ished in 1928 were accurate. In fact, despite Freemans own lengthy field-
work in Samoa, the issue remains unsettled. Perhaps it will never be settled,
for Mead worked in another part of Samoa (under a different coionial
regime, with different missionary influences, and with a different economic
base), and she was working 20 years-and a world war-before Freeman
began his own field studies. It may even be that both were right, Freeman
reporting the way things look from the point of view of the male establish-

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ment, Mead the way things may have been from the point of view of adole-
scent girls. The testimony of other ethnographers who have worked in the
region does not resolve the dispute, some finding a great deal of merit
in Meads work, despite obvious shortcomings, others supporting some of
Freemans central criticisms.
It is also possible that both Freeman and Mead are wrong on crucial
points, since the issues which Freeman stresses are often difficult to inves-
tigate-issues such as whether Samoans tend to be balanced personalities
or liable to extreme moods, or even ostensibly more evident questions, for

example concerning the incidence of violence, which any criminologist

knows to be a matter fraught with complexity, and one which cannot
simply be settled-as Freeman claims to do-by appeals to official court
records.
However, the ethnographic critique is only one element of Freemans
book. The study is presented in Popperian terms as an exercise in refuta-
tion. By refuting Meads study of Samoa, Freeman claims to be testing to
destruction the Boasian theory of cultural relativism; and he claims that
this theory remains the dominant orthodoxy in American anthropology to
the present day. More than a third of the book-over one hundred pages-
is devoted to the historical discussion of this theory, which, Freeman insists,
inspired Mead, and which she was determined to sustain with her findings.
Freeman represents Boas, after the First World War, as engaged in a
confrontation with the eugenicists, who purveyed a politicized theory of
biological determinism. Boass strategy involved the dissociation of cul-
tural analysis from biology, and he drew his students after him, notably, in
Freemans account, Kroeber and Lowie, who were together responsible for
extending Boass critique and who precipitated the disjunction of cultural
anthropology from biology and so made way for the unqualified acceptance
of cultural determinism (Freeman, 1983: 47). By about 1920, according to
Freeman, the Boasians and their paradigm dominated American anthro-
pology (Freeman, 1983: 50).
Freemans claim that by refuting Mead on Samoa-if that is what he
has done-he has radically undermined cultural determinism is, of course,
absurd. No cultural determinist in the 1980s would have depended on this
single, rather lightweight study to sustain a thesis which has been pro-
pounded, in one form or another, by thinkers from Montesquieu through
Nietzsche, Herder and even Wittgenstein, to Derrida or Rorty today.
Nevertheless, there is on the face of it nothing absurd about Freemans
argument that Meads work in Samoa was shaped by the theoretical de-
mands of Boas and Benedict, or about his claim that she was a protagonist
in a polemical battle between cultural determinists and biological deter-

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minists, a battle which was politically of the greatest signficance at the

time. But this thesis is open to question on historical grounds. It has been
argued that Boas and the Boasians were generally sceptical of the pattern
of culture research programme associated with Benedict and Mead, and
suspicious about the quality of Meads ethnography (Murray, 1990: 404).
I am uncertain how conscious Freeman was of another historical context
of his controversy, a connection recognized by some of the journalists who
picked it up. This had to do with the use made of Meads Samoan book
to provide a mythological underpinning of certain American ideas about
child-rearing. It is significant that Mead worked closely with Benjamin
Spock-who delivered her daughter, and who watched her feed on de-
mand, on the Samoan pattern, and according to Mead was converted to
this baby-friendly system. Conservatives later held Mead responsible, with
Spock, for producing the generation of young people who repudiated the
Vietnam war. The 1980s in America proved to be more hospitable to the
notion that there was a fixed human nature, and that it was inevitably
aggressive and selfish, and Freemans book seemed to vindicate this posi-
tion, though in fact Freeman is rather elusive and ambiguous when pressed
on these points.
Within the more parochial context of American anthropology, the dis-
pute also fed into the endemic confrontation, in American departments,
between physical and cultural anthropologists; and within cultural anthro-
pology it provided grist to the mill of the new relativism, which emerged at
about the same time as Freemans book under the banner of postmodern-
ism and claimed that the lesson to be drawn from the controversy was that
ethnographers were not right 7or wrong but simply, necessarily, saw things
differently from one another.
Freeman is a rather straightforward positivist, so it is worth asking why
he devoted over a third of his book to putting Meads work in an historical
context. Clearly, this contextualization is integral to the books thesis.
Freeman has not spent all that polemical energy simply to discredit a 60-
year-old apprentice field-study. He believes that he is engaging an entire
intellectual tradition at a strategic point. His argument is therefore neces-
sarily partly historical in form, and it surely matters that the history should
be taken seriously in its own right. If he is wrong about the history, this
must have repercussions for the rest of his argument.
Finally, a critical account of a tradition may treat it as a whole, attemp-
ting to define and address its deep structure. My recent book, The Inven-
tion of Primitive Society, was an attempt to make explicit the concepts
which underlie a century of research in social anthropology. The argument
is that a particular model of primitive society was developed by a small set

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of lawyers in the second half of the 19th century. They defined a single, ori-
ginal type of society, based on descent groups. Later, a notion of an ori-
ginal type of religion was linked to this idea of the original type of society,
under the label of totemism. Despite various transformations-indeed,
through structural transformations-these concepts persisted for a cen-
tury, becoming more influential than ever after empirical investigation of
tropical so-called primitive societies began in a systematic way at the turn
of the century. As more and better ethnographic studies became available
the original concepts were enriched and made subtler and more sophistica-
ted, but the terms of the original model were retained through a succession
of often brilliant and creative transformations.
My argument in the book is that these underlying concepts are crude,
overgeneralized and inadequate to represent the ethnographic materials;
indeed, that this is evident from the analysis of ethnographies, which re-
veals the twists and tricks which were necessary to accommodate the ex-
periences of the ethnographers to the procrustean bed constructed by
Victorian theorists. I also try to explain why it was so difficult to break out
of this trap, essentially because it served so well to relate broader concerns
with race and citizenship to the research of ethnographers. The concepts
with which ethnographers worked were part of a larger, more potent theore-
tical discourse from which it was very difficult to escape. Perhaps more
importantly, the models proved to be apt for transformation, offering a
vein of discourse rich in professional opportunities.

III

So far, I have treated anthropologists writing history as though they all

shared a similar orientation. This is true up to a point, in that they do tend
to treat intellectual traditions as though they were cultures. They also com-
monly take a presentist position, at least to the extent that they treat their
historical enquiries as sources for theoretical argument. But there are, of
course, significant differences. Modern anthropologists are divided on
questions of theory, and they bring to their historiography the same range
of theoretical differences as they bring to the interpretation of ethnography.
There is nothing new about this. Evolutionist anthropologists naturally
favoured a whig view of the history of their discipline, which was grandly
progressive. Diffusionists, perhaps oddly, did not deliver a history of their
discipline which was restricted to tracing influences. Functionalist anthro-
pologists believed that history-except in the useful form of myth-was
largely irrelevant to analysing the here and now, and as Jarvie has pointed

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out this helps to account for the lack of interest in the history of anthro-
pology shown by the functionalist generation (Jarvie, 1989: 345-6). (There
was another reason, too. They thought that all their predecessors were

fundamentally in error, and so could, even should, be ignored.)

Modern anthropological approaches to disciplinary history could be
labelled structuralist, marxist, postmodernist, and so on. These differences
are characteristic of modern anthropology, but they are not peculiarly

anthropological. Similar differences characterize modern historiography.

The anthropological approaches to the history of anthropology are hardly
to be distinguished from the competing approaches which are to be found
in the history of science more generally. This is not because the anthro-
pologists change their allegiances when they turn to their own history,
but rather because the same theories guide contemporary intellectual his-
torians and ethnographers. Modern schools of anthropology and history
of science can be matched with each other and divided into three main
categories.
First, there are the hard externalists, who treat the science as ideology,
in the manner of Said on Orientalism. These correspond with some marxist
and Durkheimian writers in anthropology, for whom intellectual activities
are to be understood, at least very largely, as the expression of prior group
interests. Influential in the 1970s, this is a tradition of analysis which still
has its exponents today, two recent examples being Bruce Triggers A His-
tory of Archaeological Thought (1989), and Joan Vincents Anthropology
and Politics (1990), both of which are marxist in orientation. Another ver-
sion of this thesis links schools of thought with institutional networks and
power plays in academe, as in Stockings essays on Boas (Stocking, 1968)
or in Bourdieus analysis of Parisian academic life (Bourdieu, 1988).
At the other extreme, in anthropology and in historiography, is the
culturalist school. In anthropology the key figure is Geertz, and Geertzs
influence on American historiography has been significant. I detect an
affinity between Geertz and Thomas Kuhn, who are, of course, contem-
poraries, and who both developed their ideas at Harvard in the 1950s. The
thesis they share is that a culture-or a paradigm-controls perception
and interpretation, constituting a closed system of thought and language.
This is a position which I think Stocking has adopted more and more in his
recent work, and it may account for his strength in contextualization and
his increasing unconcern with narrative, with linking successive genera-
tions of thought; which is also, perhaps, why his two large projects were
conceived as monographs but emerged ultimately as collections of essays,
each probing a specific context (Stocking, 1968, 1987).
The third approach attempts to treat culture and social structure in a

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138

single analytical framework without succumbing either to reductionism

or idealism. There is perhaps no necessary reason why this should be
the case, but today those who prefer this holistic perspective tend to be
structuralists. I would associate as structuralists such anthropologists as
Ldvi-Strauss, Dumont and Sahlins, on the one hand, with an historian of
science like Foucault on the other. This is dangerous ground, if only be-
cause Foucaults ambiguous and incomplete oeuvre is the subject of great
contention, but Foucault himself drew attention to his affinities with the
structuralism of the Annales school and with Ldvi-Strauss and Lacan.
Drawing on a recent account of Foucaults project by Gary Gutting (1989),
I would stress Foucaults decentring of the person, the great thinker, in his
work, and his search for what Bachelard called the underlying concepts
rather than the theories of a particular discursive formation; a project
which has a great deal in common with structuralist specifications of, for
example, regional cultural traditions, or indeed with Dumonts account
of the invention of economic theory. Foucault comes rather close to
Dumonts proposition that an intellectual tradition is a sort of collective
representation, and that its fundamental tenets are likely to remain im-
plicit, to be discovered only by analysis (Dumont, 1977: 19). Foucault,
similarly, attempts to dig up the unconscious concepts which constitute a
discursive formation, and to identify structural transformations which may
be generated within it.
Yet despite these evident parallels, a crucial difference remains between
what the anthropologist is about when studying another culture and what
the historian of science is trying to do, at least when addressing the prac-
titioner. For the practitioner demands lessons from history, and invites the
historian to be critical of the traditions which are being interpreted. Wri-
ting the history of anthropology, one cannot evade the requirement that
one should provide a form of applied anthropology. And this can raise

very particular problems.

If an historian-or an anthropologist-believes that academic produc-
tions are determined by class position, colonial interests, or political fac-
tionalism in academia; or that the anthropologist (perhaps like everyone
else) is imprisoned in a cultural straitjacket; then he or she is taking up a
relativist position which undermines both the historical project (for it is
also, then, just the expression of a particular interest or cultural set), and
the seriousness of the anthropologists project which it addresses (which
would then be no more than a symptom of a particular disease). In prac-
tice, each of these traditions will support a weaker reading of their prem-
ises, which allows for some escape from the prison of cultural or social
determinism. The purpose of history may then be to make the practitioner

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 139

conscious of these constraints, of the forces which shape practice. It would

then facilitate dissent, criticism and innovation. That is, in my view, the
ideal outcome of reading-and perhaps even writing-the history of
anthropology.
I do not mean to suggest that the history of anthropology is necessarily
critical, much less that it must take the form of a Popperian rebuttal, such
as Freeman attempted, and which Ian Jarvie recommends as the ideal.8

Rather, I see the history of anthropology as offering the possibility of a

really challenging reflexivity. If the anthropologist is to be reflexive, this
may be achieved by becoming a historian of our tradition. An alternative
would be to do ethnographic research on schools of anthropology, but I
should warn from my own experience that this is a high-risk option. Either
project is obviously superior to the reflexive move in American anthro-
pology, which has been personal, literary and solipsistic, reflecting a very
American concern with the self.
A reflexive anthropologist would do better to draw on other traditions-
at once historical and anthropological-to develop a more complex under-
standing of practice. It might be particularly enlightening to reconsider the
genesis of the major traditions within the discipline, the competing evolu-
tionist and humanistic traditions which have developed especially in the
USA, and the dominantly social science perspectives which we tend to take
for granted in Europe.9 And as we respond to the confrontation which
must surely come now with the very different ethnological traditions of
eastern Europe, we may reflect on the division which has developed in
western Europe (with the curious exception of Spain) between social an-
thropology and the tradition of national folklore and ethnology. There is,
perhaps, also room for a history of histories of anthropology: but at this
point reflexivity threatens to become infinite regress.

NOTES

1 Tim Ingold responded vigorously to an early draft of this paper, stimulating me to think
again on a number of points I am grateful to my colleagues, Gerd Baumann and Nikolas
Rose, for helpful comments on an earlier draftI was also much helped by discussions in
the intercollegiate seminar of London University (organized by the social anthropologists
at Goldsmiths College) and by the seminar of the ERASME team in Pans in January
1991 A version of this paper was presented at the Granada meetings of the Federación
de Asociaciones de Antropologia del Estado Español in December 1990, and was
published in Spanish in the conference proceedings
2 This view of our intellectual history was echoed by Leach in an interview with Kuper
(1986)

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 140

the sequence is always dialectical There was a point in my anthropological

development when Malinowski could do no wrong In the next phase Malinowski
could do no nght But with matunty I came to see that there was ment on both sides
I see this as a Hegelian process, a very fundamental element in the way that
thinking in the humanities develops over time But when this sequence leads you
round in a circle, you are not just back where you started You have moved on a bit,
or you moved somewhere else But always the process involves the initial rejection
of your immediate ancestors, the teachers to whom you are most directly indebted
(Kuper, 1986 380)
3 This occurs in the prologue to L P Hartleys novel, The Go-Between An unrepentant

opponent of antiquarianism might reply, with Marlowes Barabas But that was in
another country And besides, the wench is dead
4 See, for instance, From Mandeville to Marx (Dumont, 1977) and Essays on Individualism
(Dumont, 1986)
5 My book Anthropologists and Anthropology (Kuper, 1973) attempted a similar group
portrait of the modern British school
6 This is the essay which Ingold rejected for Man It was published in History of the
Human Sciences (Kuper, 1990a)
7 For a rather extreme formulation of this argument, see Heider (1988)
8 See Jarvie (1989) He identifies my Invention of Primitive Society as an example of
Popperian history, though he claims thatI think Popper is spelt K-U-H-N
I Perhaps the
affinities are rather with Foucault, and I am certainly not proposing an alternative thesis
about primitive society
9I began to sketch an account of these traditions in an editorial in Current Anthropology
(Kuper, 1990b)

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