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Preface to the First EditionThis is an ambitious book, but not a pretentious one. It is ambitiousin that it tries, within the space of relatively few pages, to make senseof the diverse history of anthropology. Our priorities, omissionsand interpretations are bound to be contested, since there can beno single authoritative history of anything, least of all a sprawling,dynamic and disputed field like anthropology. Still, the book isunpretentious, since our aim throughout has been to offer a soberand balanced account of the historical growth of anthro pology asa discipline, not to propose a radical re-interpretation of it.There exists a growing scholarly literature on the history ofanthropology, which this textbook does not try to compete with.Nevertheless, we know of no existing book with exactly the samescope as this one. The scholarly literature is often specialised, andexisting textbooks on anthropological history are either moretheoretically oriented or more committed to one or a few professionaltraditions. Although we may not always have succeeded, we havestrived to give an impression of the parallel, convergent andinterdependent developments of all major traditions in social andcultural anthropology.The book is chronologically ordered. Beginning with the ‘protoanthropologies’ from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, itcontinues with the creation of academic anthropology and thegrowth of classical sociology during the nineteenth century. Thethird chapter concentrates on the four men who, by generalconsensus, are considered the founding fathers of twentieth-centuryanthropology, and the fourth chapter indicates how their work wascontinued, and diversified, by their students. The fifth and sixthchapters both deal with the same period – from about 1946 to about1968, but concentrate on different trends: Chapter 5 discusses thetheoretical controversies surrounding concepts of society and socialintegration, while Chapter 6 covers concepts of culture and symbolicmeaning. In Chapter 7, the intellectual and political upheavals ofthe 1960s and 1970s are presented, with emphasis on the impulsesemanating from Marxism and feminism. Chapter 8 deals withthe 1980s, concentrating on the postmodernist movement and itsclose cousin, postcolonialism, two critical trends, which seriouslyixEriksen HOA3 00 pre 916/04/2013 16:04

x A History of Anthropologychallenged the discipline’s self-confidence; while the ninth and finalchapter presents a few of the major post-postmodern trends thatemerged during the 1990s.We do not consider the history of anthropology to be a lineartale of progress. Some ‘modern’ controversies, for example, haveoccupied scholars since the Enlightenment and even earlier. At thesame time, we believe that there has been a steady, cumulativegrowth in knowledge and understanding within the subject, notleast with regard to method. Moreover, as anthropology respondsto changes in the outside world, its substantial focus changesaccordingly. Thus, the movement from the early industrial andcolonial age to the information age of global modernities has ledthe subject through a series of transformations, yet essentially itcontinues to raise the same questions that were asked 50, 100 oreven 200 years ago.Oslo/Copenhagen, July 2001THE & FSNEriksen HOA3 00 pre 1016/04/2013 16:04

1Proto-AnthropologyHow long have anthropologists existed? Opinions are dividedon this issue. The answer depends on what you mean by ananthropologist. People around the world have always been curiousabout their neighbours and more remote people. They have gossipedabout them, fought them, married them and told stories aboutthem. Some of their stories were written down. Some were latercriticised as inaccurate or ethnocentric (or flatly racist). Some storieswere compared with others, about other people, leading to generalassumptions about ‘people elsewhere’, and what humans everywherehave in common. In this broad sense, we start an anthropologicalenquiry the moment a foreigner moves into the neighbouring flat.If we restrict ourselves to anthropology as a scientific discipline,some would trace its roots back to the European Enlightenmentduring the eighteenth century; others would claim that anthropologydid not arise as a science until the 1850s, others again wouldargue that anthropological research in its present-day sense onlycommenced after the First World War. Nor can we avoid suchambiguities.It is beyond doubt, however, that anthropology, considered as thescience of humanity, originated in the region we commonly refer toas ‘the West’, notably in four ‘Western’ countries: France, Britain,the USA and Germany. Historically speaking, this is a Europeandiscipline, and its practitioners, like those of all European sciences,occasionally like to trace its roots back to the ancient Greeks.HERODOTUS AND OTHER GREEKSThanks to research carried out by anthropologists, historians andarchaeologists, we today believe that ‘the ancient Greeks’ differedquite radically from ourselves. In the classical city-states, more thanhalf the population were slaves; free citizens regarded manual labouras degrading, and democracy (which was also ‘invented’ by theGreeks) was probably more similar to the competitive potlatchfeasts of the Kwakiutl (Chapter 4), than to the institutions describedin modern constitutions (Finley 1973; P. Anderson 1974).1Eriksen HOA3 01 text 116/04/2013 16:04

2 A History of AnthropologyGoing back to the Greeks is thus a long journey, and we peer intotheir world through cracked and smoky glass. We catch glimpses oflittle city-states surrounded by traditional Iron Age farmland wherefamily and kinship formed the main social units, connected to theoutside world through a network of maritime trade relationshipsbetween urban settlements along the Mediterranean and Black Seacoasts. The trade in luxury goods and the free labour entailed byslavery brought considerable wealth to the cities, and the citizens ofthe polis, with their distaste for manual work, had at their disposala large surplus, which they used, among other things, to wage war,and to build temples, stadiums, baths and other public buildings,where male citizens could meet and engage in philosophical disputesand speculations about how the world was put together.It was in such a community that Herodotus of Halicarnassus(c. 484–425 bce) lived. Born in a Greek colonial town on thesouth-west coast of present-day Turkey, Herodotus began to travelas a young man and gained personal knowledge of the many foreignpeoples that the Greeks maintained contacts with. Today, Herodotusis mainly remembered for his history of the Persian Wars (Herodotus1982), but he also wrote detailed travel narratives from various partsof western Asia and Egypt, and (based on second-hand information)from as far away as the land of the Scythians on the northern coastof the Black Sea, the Ethiopians, and the peoples of the Indus valley.In these narratives, far removed as they are from our present world,we recognise a problem that has pursued anthropology, in variousguises, up to this day: how should we relate to ‘the Others’? Arethey basically like ourselves, or basically different? Most, if not all,anthropological theory has tried to strike a balance between thesepositions, and this is what Herodotus did too. Sometimes he is aprejudiced and ethnocentric ‘civilised man’, who disdains everythingforeign. At other times he acknowledges that different peoples havedifferent values because they live under different circumstances,not because they are morally deficient. Herodotus’ descriptionsof language, dress, political and judicial institutions, crafts andeconomics are highly readable today. Although he sometimesclearly got the facts wrong, he was a meticulous scholar, whosebooks are often the only written sources we have about peoples ofa distant past.Many Greeks tested their wits against a philosophical paradoxthat touches directly on the problem of how we should relate to‘the Others’. This is the paradox of universalism versus relativism.A present-day universalist would try to identify commonalities andEriksen HOA3 01 text 216/04/2013 16:04

Proto-Anthropology3similarities (or even universals) between different societies, whilea relativist would emphasise the uniqueness and particularity ofeach society or culture. The Sophists of Athens are sometimesdescribed as the first philosophical relativists in the Europeantradition (several almost contemporary thinkers in Asia, such asGautama Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tze, were concerned withsimilar questions). In Plato’s (427–347 bce) dialogues Protagorasand Gorgias, Socrates argues with the Sophists. We may picturethem in dignified intellectual battle, surrounded by colourful templesand solemn public buildings, with their slaves scarcely visible in theshadows between the columns. Other citizens stand as spectators,while Socrates’ faith in a universal reason, capable of ascertaininguniversal truths, is confronted by the relativist view that truth willalways vary with experience and what we would today call culture.Plato’s dialogues do not deal directly with cultural differences.But they bear witness to the fact that cross-cultural encounterswere part of everyday life in the city-states. The Greek trade routesstretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to present-day Ukraine, theyfought wars with Persians and many other ‘barbarians’. The veryterm ‘barbarian’ is Greek and means ‘foreigner’. To a Greek earit sounded as if these aliens were only able to make unintelligiblenoises, which sounded like ‘bar-bar, bar-bar’. Similarly, in Russian,Germans are to this day called nemtsy (the mute ones): those whospeak, but say nothing.Aristotle (384–322 bce) also indulged in sophisticated speculationsabout the nature of humanity. In his philosophical anthropology hediscusses the differences between humans in general and animals,and concludes that although humans have several needs in commonwith animals, only man possesses reason, wisdom and morality.He also argued that humans are fundamentally social by nature. Inanthropology and elsewhere, such a universalistic style of thought,which seeks to establish similarities rather than differences betweengroups of people, plays a prominent role to this day. Furthermore,it seems clear that anthropology has vacillated up through historybetween a universalistic and a relativistic stance, and that centralfigures in the discipline are also often said to lean either towardsone position or the other.AFTER ANTIQUITYIn the classical Greek city-state, conditions were perhaps particularlyfavourable for the development of systematic science. But in theEriksen HOA3 01 text 316/04/2013 16:04

4 A History of Anthropologyensuing centuries as well, ‘civilised’ activities such as art, science andphilosophy were cultivated all around the Mediterranean: first, inthe Hellenistic period, after the Macedonian, Alexander the Great(356–323 bce) had led his armies to the northern reaches of India,spreading Greek urban culture wherever he went; then later, duringthe several centuries when Rome dominated most of Europe, theMiddle East and North Africa, and impressed on its population aculture deriving from Greek ideals. In this complex, multinationalsociety, it is not surprising to find that the Greek interest in ‘theOther’ was also carried on. Thus, the geographer Strabo (c. 63–64bce–c. ce 21) wrote several voluminous tomes about strange peoplesand distant places, which sparkle with curiosity and the joy ofdiscovery. But when Christianity was established as state religionand the Roman Empire started falling apart in the mid-fourthcentury ce, a fundamental change took place in European culturallife. Gone were the affluent citizens of the cities of Antiquity, whocould indulge in science and philosophy, thanks to their income fromtrade and slave labour. Gone, indeed, was the entire city culture,the very glue that held the Roman Empire together as an (albeitloosely) integrated state. In its place, countless local Europeanpeoples manifested themselves, carriers of Germanic, Slavic,Finno-Ugric and Celtic traditions that were as ancient as thoseof pre-urban Greece. Politically, Europe fell apart into hundredsof chiefdoms, cities and autonomous local enclaves, which wereonly integrated into larger units with the growth of the modernstate, from the sixteenth century onwards. Throughout this longperiod, what tied the continent together was largely the Church,the last lingering trustee of Roman universalism. Under the aegisof the Church, international networks of monks and clergymenarose and flourished, connecting the pockets of learning in whichthe philosophical and scientific traditions of Antiquity survived.Europeans like to see themselves as linear descendants of Antiquity,but throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was an economic, politicaland scientific periphery. Following the rise of Islam in the seventhcentury, the Arabs conquered territories from Spain to India and,for at least the next seven centuries, the economic, political andintellectual centres of the Mediterranean world lay in sophisticatedmetropolises such as Baghdad and Cordoba, not in the ruins ofRome or Athens, nor in glorified villages such as London or Paris.The greatest historian and social philosopher of this period was IbnKhaldun (1332–1406), who lived in present-day Tunisia. Khaldunwrote, among other things, a massive history of the Arabs andEriksen HOA3 01 text 416/04/2013 16:04

Proto-Anthropology5Berbers, furnished with a long, critical introduction on his use ofsources. He developed one of the first non-religious social theories,and anticipated Émile Durkheim’s ideas about social solidarity(Chapter 2), which are today considered a cornerstone of sociologyand anthropology. In line with Durkheim and the first anthropologists who utilised his theories, Khaldun stresses the importance ofkinship and religion in creating and maintaining a sense of solidarityand mutual commitment among the members of a group. His theoryof the difference between pastoral nomads and city-states may, withthe wisdom of hindsight, be said to have been centuries ahead ofits time.A contemporary of Khaldun, Ibn Battuta (1304–1369), was inhis way just as significant for the history of anthropology. Not amajor social theorist, Battuta is considered to be the most widelytravelled person of the pre-industrial world. Born in Tangier inpresent-day Morocco, Battuta’s travels brought him as far east asChina and as far south as present-day Tanzania. Battuta’s mainwork, the Rihla (‘Travels’), was completed in 1355. Although laterscholars doubt the authenticity of some of the journeys described inthe book, it is considered a major source of knowledge about theworld known to the Arabs at the time, and of prevailing interpretations of other cultures.In spite of the cultural hegemony of the Arab world, there are afew European writings from the late medieval period, which maybe considered precursors of latter-day anthropology. Most famousis Marco Polo’s (1254–1323) account of his expedition to China,where he allegedly spent 17 years. Another example is the greatjourney through Asia described in The Voyage and Travels of SirJohn Mandeville, Knight, compiled by an unknown author in thefourteenth century. Both books stimulated the European interest inalien peoples and customs, although the reliability of their accountsmust have been questioned already then (Launay 2010).Then, with the advent of mercantilist economies and the contemporaneous Renaissance in the sciences and arts, the small, but richEuropean cities of the late Middle Ages began to develop rapidly, andthe earliest signs of a capitalist class emerged. Fired by these greatsocial movements and financed by the new entrepreneurs, a series ofgrand exploratory sea voyages were launched by European rulers.These journeys – to Africa, Asia and America – are often described inthe West as the ‘Age of Discovery’, though the ‘discovered’ peoplesthemselves may have had reason to question their greatness (seeWolf 1982).Eriksen HOA3 01 text 516/04/2013 16:04

6 A History of Anthropologythe EUROPEAN CONQUESTS and their impactThe ‘Age of Discovery’ was of crucial importance for laterdevelopments in Europe and the world, and – on a lesser scale– for the development of anthropology. From the PortugueseKing Henry the Navigator’s exploration of the West coast ofAfrica in the early fifteenth century, via Columbus’ five journeysto America (1492–1506), to Magellan’s circumnavigation of theglobe (1519–22), the travels of this period fed the imaginations ofEuropeans with vivid descriptions of places whose very existencethey had been unaware of. These travelogues, moreover, reachedwide audiences, since the printing press, invented in the mid-fifteenthcentury, soon made books a common and relatively inexpensivecommodity all over Europe.Many of the early travelogues from the New World were fullof factual errors and saturated with Christian piety and culturalprejudices. A famous example is the work of the merchant andexplorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose letters describing his voyages tothe continent that still bears his name were widely circulated at thetime. His writings were reprinted and translated, but his descriptionsof the Native Americans (who were called Indios, Indians, sinceColumbus believed he had found a route to India), reveal a muchless scrupulous attitude to facts than in Herodotus’ or Khaldun’swritings. Occasionally, Vespucci seems to use the Native Americansas a mere literary illustration, to underpin the statements he makesabout his own society. Native Americans are, as a rule, representedas distorted or, frequently, inverted reflections of Europeans: theyare godless, promiscuous, naked, have no authority or laws; they areeven cannibals! Against this background, Vespucci argues effectivelyfor the virtues of absolutist monarchy and papal power, but hisethnographic descriptions are virtually useless as clues to nativelife at the time of the Conquest.There were contemporaries of Vespucci, such as the FrenchHuguenot Jean de Léry and the Spanish clergyman Bartolomé delas Casas, who gave more truthful and even sympathetic accounts ofNative American life, and such books also sold well. But then, themarket for adventure stories from distant climes seems to have beeninsatiable in Europe at this time. In most of the books, a more or lessexplicit contrast is drawn between the Others (who are either ‘noblesavages’ or ‘barbarians’) and the existing order in Europe (whichis either challenged or defended). As we shall see in later chapters,the legacy of these early, morally ambiguous accounts still weighsEriksen HOA3 01 text 616/04/2013 16:04

Proto-Anthropology7on contemporary anthropology, and to this day, anthropologistsare often accused of distorting the reality of the peoples they writeabout – in the colonies, in the Third World, among ethnic minoritiesor in marginal areas. And, a

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