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Cambridge Histories Online

http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/

The Cambridge World History


Edited by David Christian
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139194662
Online ISBN: 9781139194662
Hardback ISBN: 9780521763332

Chapter
11 - What does anthropology contribute to world history? pp. 261-276
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139194662.012
Cambridge University Press

11

What does anthropology contribute


to world history?
jack goody
In the beginning
Although its name indicates an interest in all humankind (anthropos), anthropology nevertheless conned itself to earlier and simpler cultures and steered
away from the modern. But what were the boundaries? In the work of the
pioneers, E. B. Tylor and Sir James Frazer, this was primitive man including
survivals in later times, king-killing in Europe as well as monarchys role in
supposedly curing scrofula, known as the Kings Evil.1 This role of anthropology meant collecting data in non-literate societies from anywhere in the world,
and it provided a kind of social and intellectual account of those societies. This
would have tted the requirements of a history of the world very well.
But it had no substantial successors. With Bronislaw Malinowski and his
Revolution in Anthropology, the subject concentrated on the analysis of particular non-literate societies, essentially through eldwork methods, that is, through
observation in a detailed study of a single society. The belief was that aggregating
the knowledge of such cultures served to distort them. Since every society was
different, comparison was impossible, or possible only among close neighbours.
On the face of it, the elds of anthropology and world history moved far apart.
Thus, for many the two elds of history and anthropology have had
their place at opposite ends of the academic spectrum. World history
involves the consideration of written societies before, that is, of prehistory.
Earlier anthropology concentrated on the study of society before writing,
and, therefore, lacked such accounts or observation. It has largely conned
comparison to these primitive and simple societies; however, in the postworld war period it also took its students through the classical sociologists,
1 Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871); and James George
Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 12 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1915).

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mainly via the works of Durkheim who had himself included simple
societies in his well-known study of the rst Australians in The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life,2 as well as touching upon the works of Weber (but
hardly Marx). This had involved recent societies, as in Durkheims work on
suicide3 and the division of labour,4 and therefore the problem of modernization. Modernization obviously meant dealing with complex societies that
lay outside the acknowledged scope of the subject since this had focused on
the simple, or those without an elaborate division of labour. This concentration had dened the subject from the outset; it was the story of earlier
humankind, of the Stone and Bronze Ages in archaeology, life before writing,
and, before that, the emergence of humans in biological terms. Complexity,
however, was seen largely in relation to colonization and to elementary
industrialization, and sometimes also to the advent of writing. In practice the
presence of literacy was largely ignored in favour of a distinction between
European and other cultures. This division clearly meant that some literate
societies like China and Japan were not only other but in some respects
were also considered primitive (as in Durkheim and Mauss Primitive
Classication5). Both China and Japan were studied by students of Malinowski, even though this should have involved the use of written records.
However, history was formally excluded as an explanatory factor since
anthropology was held to depend upon observation of what went on in
the here and now, not on reports. However, not only traditional literate
societies, but more and more others were also now keeping records, so some
attention (usually sporadic) had to be given to the past, even in dominantly
oral societies. Because, although the culture itself may have operated without
writing, as was the case among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana, they were
written about, and with colonization there was the inevitable development of
administrative records. That was a condition of the expansion of Europe.
One might have thought anthropology would have little to do with world
history, especially since the functionalists and the structuralists effectively
dismissed history as an explanatory factor in the social sciences, it being
essential to explain the present by the present in a living organism, in a
2 mile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Karen E. Fields (trans.) (London:
Free Press, 1995).
3 mile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, George Simpson and John A. Spaulding
(trans.) (London: Routledge, 2002).
4 mile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, W. D. Halls (trans.) (New York: Free
Press, 1997).
5 mile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classication, Rodney Needham (trans.)
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

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Anthropologys contribution to world history

biological manner. That is how things have been since the Malinowskian
revolution of the 1920s but it was not so beforehand.
Drawing the boundary between modern and traditional in this way
singled out later European societies, as being different from the rest, for
example in culture such as in the development of cuisine and the use
of cultivated owers. However, a brief examination of Indian and Chinese
cuisines and restaurant cultures, as well as the use of owers in their ceremonies and for dress, immediately indicated the kind of complexity that put
the cultures on roughly the same level and threw doubts on this division. This
was equally the case with communication, with writing. The earlier assumptions of the uniqueness of the Greek alphabet were questioned by an increasing understanding of the eastern varieties and the realization that syllabic and
logographic scripts had their own advantages as instruments of communication. They could permit extensive literacy and the development of an
elaborate written culture, which in Chinas case included long realistic novels
and both a philosophical and scientic tradition.
But world history and anthropology are in fact not so distant as was once
thought. Historians are trained to examine written documents; their work is in
the library rather than the eld, that is, with reports of what has happened rather
than undertaking rst-hand observation, although the category oral history has
rather blurred this issue, since history normally involves written records, not oral
accounts. Unless recorded in some way, these oral accounts cannot be rechecked
and are therefore evanescent. In both elds, however, there is some tension
between the intensive library and archival examination of particular groups or
between particular observational studies on the one hand and the wider comparative ones that take into account a number of societies, or even all (the
world, or perhaps just the Old World, with its written tradition). In anthropology (of the social and cultural kind) that interest had led to comparative study of
the sort earlier practised by Tylor or Frazer but now quite out of fashion. It has
been partly replaced not only by intensive eldwork of the Malinowskian kind
but also, after the work of mile Durkheim and his British followers, especially
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and, to a lesser extent, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and others of
his generation, by a theoretical interest in comparative sociology.
At that time, in the 1940s and 1950s, there were few anthropological studies
of western societies such as Lloyd Warners on Newburyport in Massachusetts
in 1941 (he had originally worked with the Murngin of Australia),6 for Europe
6 W. Lloyd Warner, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1941).

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jack goody

was basically out of bounds (except for witchcraft and other survivals); we
studied other cultures, and even societies such as India and China with strong
written traditions were held to be in the same category as the primitive,
most notably by Durkheim for primitive classication in relation to China,7
as well as by Lvi-Strauss in relation to marriage,8 and for India especially by
Dumont in relation to this and to general development.9 In drawing this
supposed distinction they failed to see the basic similarities even of these
other written cultures with Europe that were emphasized by Needham in his
magisterial work on China, which he showed was more modern than
earlier Europe.10 So they drew the line round modern in a thoroughly
nineteenth-century way, which was the wrong line in the wrong place, failing
to accord sufcient importance to literacy, which was common to all the
major Eurasian societies. Indeed when students of anthropology did work in
such other cultures, they tended to ignore the written tradition, even to the
extent of not knowing how to read its script. They cut themselves off from
that aspect of local life and treated it as an oral culture. The situation has
now changed, sociology and anthropology have grown larger or created new
boundaries, leading to the conceptual intermingling or even confusion of
each eld with the other, except that the second has specialized in microobservation, the rst in macro-sociology.
In practice, however, comparative sociology was a dream; anthropology
became nothing of the kind except with Durkheims school in France.
Indeed it was impossible to marry up intensive and extensive study, and even
the tentative steps to considering that possibility led to a conict between
Evans-Pritchard (who had earlier studied history, as had many other early
anthropologists) and other social anthropologists. However, he did think
wider comparison was possible within the context of Primitive Societies
and Other Cultures and his students went on to produce a number of
general volumes of this kind.11 Nevertheless, comparative volumes were
valued very much less than reports on particular societies, which were seen
7 Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classication.
8 Claude Lvi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, James Harle Bell, Rodney Needham, and John Richard von Sturmer (trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
9 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, Mark Sainsbury
(trans.) (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970).
10 Joseph Needham, et al. (eds.), Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1954).
11 Ronald Godfrey Lienhardt, Social Anthropology (London: Oxford University Press,
1964); John Beattie, Other Cultures: Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology
(London: Cohen & West, 1964); and David Francis Pocock, Social Anthropology
(London: Sheed & Ward, 1961).

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Anthropologys contribution to world history

as presenting the actual data as distinct from aggregate material that tted
some societies but not others. Comparison could distort and there was much
concern, for example, about interpreting Dinka concepts of the soul in Nuer
terms. Every culture was different. Yes, but. . .

How can the oral help the written?


If history is concerned with written cultures and anthropology with oral
ones, can there be much trafc between the two? Yes. First, anthropology
can help to make history less ethnocentric, less European in the case of the
west. It can do this in two ways, by bringing other societies into consideration and by leading people back to earlier ones, in both cases trying to
redress the bias in favour of ones own culture. Second, it can emphasize the
value of direct observational evidence to supplement the use of books. Books
are the backbone of historical study, but not so for anthropology, for which
the main source of knowledge is eldwork.
But apart from lessening ethnocentrism and emphasizing observations in
the eld, what does the study of social anthropology do for the historian?
First, the societies studied by anthropologists are considered by historians
primarily in terms of the impact of the west, as the receivers of colonialism.
Many of them were certainly this, the subjects of the European takeover. But
they had their own story, or prehistory from the standpoint of writing, a life
of their own, and this too is often misunderstood by historians. They tend to
neglect or misinterpret evidence from earlier times. For example, some
classicists see Greece as having invented democracy, whereas many earlier
societies with simpler forms of organization consulted their members at
frequent intervals. And even in the later, historic, period, local government
in the Ancient Near East often insisted on such consultation while some
Phoenician towns, including the colony at Carthage, had a yet more elaborate system involving the written vote. Neither Greece, Europe nor the Near
East, however, were the only practitioners of consultation, though they did
develop writing that was used for many purposes. Thales may have been the
rst Phoenician philosopher to leave a written record; he was certainly not
the rst to try and conceptualize the world in a general moral and intellectual
framework; the precursors of Ogotemmli, the Dogon sage,12 did that.

12 Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas


(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

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Anthropology can contribute to world history by saving us from some of


these errors into which literates are only too liable to fall.
Anthropology can therefore help to modify the inevitable tendency to
attribute uniqueness to the institutions of ones own society, or to the west,
not only for democracy, but also for law, religion, monogamy or even
the family, which leads to a general tendency to see those earlier societies as
savage, and thus to erecting the imaginary evolutionary schemas of
conjectural history. Rejecting such schemas meant that the differences that
did exist between us and them had then to be explained in more concrete
terms, not by means of questionable developmental sequences.
Most societies had created accounts of the world in which they placed
themselves in relation to their neighbours and sometimes others too. World
history, then, is nothing new. All societies had some concept of how they
themselves tted into the wider picture. But earlier world histories were
sometimes tied to a particular religion or even to a country, ones own.
However, contemporary world history has become largely secularized in the
sense that it is not linked to the superiority of one creed nor indeed to the
events controlled by any supernatural power. It can no longer credit the idea
of a deity with supernatural intervention either at Milvian Bridge or at
Dunkirk, although, once established, religious belief of this kind may well
affect the course of events; the Cross was important in urging Christian
soldiers onward, as was the Crescent under Saladin. But as far as is possible
the world historian must remain neutral, indeed secular, which was especially problematic under monotheism; polytheism was more permissive, as
in classical Europe. But the secular story emerged only later when history
had acquired some kind of long-term developmental perspective, such as that
of the Three Ages of Man, which helped classify archaeological material.
Oral cultures already had some ideas about their past, even if this hardly
counted as history, just as they had such ideas about geographical space.
They had, for example, drum histories (histories of a kingdom beaten out
on a talking drum, one that imitates the pattern of speech) that offered a
version of the past of a particular kingdom. In any case, a consideration of the
past as the present was always acceptable to anthropologists. The history that
was excluded was not the study of this past, they could do that, but a study of
the written past, which required documents and libraries. So the literate
European cultures were excluded from eldwork, although even there the
oral (or rather the lecto-oral), the spoken interaction in contrast to the
written, became a focus of some anthropological enquiry. But primarily
it was only the primitive, or simple, or other that fell into their scope.
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Anthropologys contribution to world history

The modern was out of bounds but nevertheless this was included in works
recommended for their students. Moreover the simple comprised oral not
only in aboriginal societies but, surprisingly, in India and China too, although
they had a substantial written tradition and their own version of history. They
had writing but on the other hand they were not considered modern, they
were oriental, dealt with not in a history faculty but in an oriental department.

The simple and the complex


Setting a boundary between simple and complex was complicated. In the
nineteenth century, Europeans produced various schema based on different
things: the Three Ages of Man concept used the dominant material (stone,
bronze, iron); Marx used modes of production; Weber used intellectual
orientation and the Protestant ethic; and others family and marriage, or
political systems. In all of these, the notion was that European institutions
were always the most advanced of all, thus justifying colonialism. Neither the
Weberian nor the Marxist theses stand up to the test of comparative history,
though they both bring the whole of Eurasia into their account. They both
see capitalism or true capitalism as a European development, neglecting in
my view the growth of exchange, manufacture, and accounting in the east
and the Near East, which had rst seen the development of written societies.
After querying the implications of the Eurocentric argument about the
uniqueness of the Greek alphabet, a uniqueness that had been essential to the
earlier discussions of Watt and myself 13 about the transformative role of
(western) writing and modes of communication more generally, the view of
most historians and sociologists, I drew the line in a different place, not
between the modern and the traditional so much as between the literate and
the oral. This recognized the concrete fact of differences, but the emphasis
on communication set aside the simple/complex division that had turned
around the nineteenth-century obsession about the invention of capitalism
(modernity) in Europe and the whole concern with the Uniqueness of the
West. It also recognized that literacy was not simply an aspect of an
inherited culture but could be acquired by others, and that the mass
introduction of schools, then taking place on a worldwide scale, thanks to
UNESCO and to colonial and newly independent regimes, could revolutionize the transmission of knowledge, as had happened in many parts of the
13 Jack Goody and Ian Watt, The Consequences of Literacy, Comparative Studies in
Society and History 5 (1963), 30445.

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world in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Once that discussion
had been set aside, the whole rationale for the special analytic category of
simple societies was fatally weakened, and Eurasia, with its written history,
could then be considered as a whole analytically, making world history, or
at least Eurasian history of the written variety, more manageable. History
now included the story of all the major societies with writing (leaving aside
history in the wider sense of a study of the past).

Regional comparison
The regional interest among anthropologists had led to collections such as
African Political Systems14 edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard and African
Systems of Kinship and Marriage15 edited by Radcliffe-Brown and Forde, which
were not simply aggregates of individual accounts, unlike many historical
anthologies, but which comprised a theoretical introduction discussing
some general features of the regional societies and therefore acting in a
preliminary way as a tool towards the story of the whole world, even if
denying that intention. This attempt at the unied treatment of Africa drew
some scholars to broader questions as it called attention to their general
features, and led to comparisons with areas outside of Africa, such as studies
of the difference between (and implications of) bridewealth in Africa on the
one hand, and dowry transactions in Eurasia on the other. This realization
cut the cake in a different way. World history was not just a matter of taking
into account the east, as Marx and Weber had in fact done, but re-evaluating
the whole boundary drawn between the modern west and the more traditional (and primitive) east, and in re-equilibrating the supposed imbalance
between the two. Taking the world into account was not itself enough,
unless one balanced the assumed disparity, which world events were now
contradicting every day.
The similarities within Eurasia and Africa themselves were important;
anthropologists usually stress the particular features of the culture in which
they worked, as do the people themselves, disregarding the many similarities
between them and their neighbours. This realization of similar features led
me to contrast the structures of Africa and Europe in terms of the
14 M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems (London: Oxford
University Press, 1940).
15 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde (eds.), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage
(London: Oxford University Press, 1950).

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Anthropologys contribution to world history

development of advanced Bronze Age societies (with their technologies of


metal, urbanization, and cultures of a written kind) and to see them as
related to the structures of family (or kinship for anthropologists). For
example, in Eurasia there was much more similarity between the east and
west in this sphere than most had argued for, especially Malthus and those
many historians (and anthropologists) who followed him in relating Western
European achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to supposed differences in family structure, a difference that has been set aside not
only by the work with Tambiah16 but more importantly by that of Lee and
Feng,17 who rejected the arguments that had sprung out of the undoubted
dominance of Western Europe in many spheres at the beginning of the
Industrial Revolution. Our understanding was based on quite another interpretation of the history, if not of the world, at least on a new rebalancing of
the Old World and its literate civilizations. That can be seen not only by a
broader history than European scholars (or others) have normally undertaken, but by going back not to supposedly signicant differences between
east and west, accounting for what we can now see in some respects as a
temporary state of affairs instead of appealing to essentialist factors of a
more permanent ethnic kind, but by going back to common origins.
The attempts to explain capitalism as a western phenomenon, by
nineteenth-century westerners themselves, suffer from myopia, that is, not
looking widely enough but also not going back deeply enough in time to see
the many connections between the written cultures of Eurasia in the Bronze
Age that derived from a common origin in the Ancient Near East a
common origin that produced great cultural differences but stressed the
shared commonalities in this period of the written word and of the metal
age. Only a reshaped world history can do this justice. Reshaped it has to be
because most previous attempts in Eurasia were too strongly inuenced by
their origins as in the case of Rashid al-Dins Islamic attempt, in the more
restricted version of Chinese scholars, or especially in the work of many
westerners in the nineteenth century. Clearly these written cultures had to
place themselves in the known world, as did all those elsewhere. And each
did so in an ethnocentric way that was often heavily inuenced by the
prevailing religion. But it is the job of scholarship to check or modify such

16 Jack Goody and S. J. Tambiah (eds.), Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973).
17 James Z. Lee and Feng Wang, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and
Chinese Realities, 17002000 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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widespread distortion, not to build on it and to assume a quasi-permanent


superiority, as Western Europe (and others) did in the nineteenth century,
translating temporary advantage into a long-term ethnic or even racial
superiority.
Taking a wider view, we can see such advantage or superiority as a matter
of alternation, as part of un histoire pendulaire, but such a perspective comes
up against egocentric prejudice, which is partly why world history meets
with much resistance. The egocentric or even national point of view is one
taught in every school and is natural to us all, but it is one that has to be
eradicated or at least greatly modied if one is to understand the history of
the world, or even that of ones own country in this mondial age.

The Bronze Age, writing, and the history of others


Many aspects of contemporary life clearly began in the Bronze Age. Writing,
metals, urban society, civilization, the religions of conversion, especially the
monotheistic ones, and all that they implied. But humankind had existed long
before and it was both this long dure of oral cultures and the relatively rapid
change with literacy that world history aims to emphasize. However, we do
not see exchange, technology, or family life as beginning with our rst
records but in various ways as being developed at that time.
Usually history takes a very egocentric view, as We the people. Primitive history is inevitably centred on ones own community and this is how
it is still often taught in todays schools. That teaches of course about ones
neighbours too, and what we know of the rest of the world has expanded
with literacy and communication, especially in Europes case with the
Renaissance. But that was not just a western phenomenon. Others visited
different societies. The Chinese too travelled, both by sea and by land. So
too did the Indians and many other citizens of Bronze Age societies. As
people and goods travelled, so too did knowledge of the world increase,
especially with writing. However, that knowledge was often interpreted in
terms of a societys view of others as inferior, even barbarous. And this was
especially the case when reinforced by a conviction of religious superiority
of the monotheistic variety.
So the major challenge in world history is not simply one of extending
the scope from the national to the world, or at least to Eurasia if one is
conning history to written cultures; pre-Columbian America had some
writing but it was hardly a full written culture in the Near Eastern sense,
after, say, 2000 bce. This extension itself took several forms. In simple
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Anthropologys contribution to world history

societies there was the acknowledgement of neighbours. But with writing


there was an elementary comparative history that included accounts of
other written cultures; in Europe this might just include Egypt and Rome.
Any such effort was greatly helped by comprehensive studies like that of
Needham18 on Chinese science and in a very different way (and for nonliterate societies) in compilations by the west in Africa and elsewhere. These
were continental or regional but collected together knowledge that could
then be used more widely.
The most severe challenge to Eurocentrism came from the other fully
literate societies of China and India, and to some extent from the Near East.
Needhams magnicent series on Chinese science and civilization has made it
inexcusable for any English-speaking scholar to ignore their contribution to
that eld. The contributions of India and the Near East are more piecemeal,
less easy to discover, and even many of the best-intentioned Europeans still
view these cultures as giving little to modernity.
World history, like anthropology, may serve to make us less ethnocentric,
or at least Eurocentric. It is of course hardly surprising that students of
literature, studying what has been written in their own language, should
consider Shakespeare, Goethe, or Molire, as sans pareil, without compare.
The same is often initially true of English, German, or French history, but
there is less excuse for this. Comparative literature may be difcult for most
to study, since it involves many languages. But world history can be done in
ones own tongue, though many documents may have to be translated. But
that process is less sensitive than with literature and the task of providing a
comprehensive summary is less problematic, so a wider, or even world,
perspective can be achieved without too much difculty, modifying in some
measure the ethnocentric bias resulting from our egocentric view of the
world as well as from early instruction in schools and colleges in national
history, even more critical for every new nation. This is a perspective that
both elds must undertake if they are to be considered in any way scientic
and not simply celebratory.
In world history it is not simply a matter of extending the range but of
rebalancing the comparison so that it questions the view that no one except
Western Europe could develop capitalism or modernization. Today such a
conning idea is immediately refuted by developments in China and India,
which are not just a matter of copying those of the west but of building on

18 Needham, et al. (eds.), Science and Civilisation.

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what these societies had themselves produced by way of a written, exchange


economy with elaborate forms of knowledge and a technology that included
cast iron and high-red porcelain in China, cotton cloth and crucible iron in
India, quite apart from the purely tropical products, the citrus fruit in China
and the spices in India. As in the west, development occurred not in one
society but often by a process of alternation. I myself was much struck by the
fact that until the Italian Renaissance, as Needham claimed, science was more
advanced in the east than in the west, and that China, India, and the Near
East were in many ways more advanced than the west until relatively
recently, well after the adoption of Arabic (that is, Indian) numerals to
replace the more cumbrous Roman kind. Of course, world history does
not always avoid Eurocentrism but it is an essential preliminary. Both Marx
and Weber in different ways included the whole of Eurasia in their sights.
Nevertheless, their reconstruction of the past was essentially Eurocentric in
that they gave Europe, and indeed England, the credit for having invented
the modern world order, that of capitalism.
One virtue of anthropology for world history is that it considers preliterate societies not simply in a mass as primitive, waiting for the advent
of civilization (usually from Europe) that they were unable to achieve
themselves. Rather it considers oral culture not only in its own right but
also as part of the journey to a more complex mode of existence. It is this
journey that archaeology tries to trace and which has culminated in attempts
such as that of Eric Wolf to write the story of Europe and the People without
History,19 the story, that is, of the rest of the world. Wolf and other more
recent scholars have set aside the dependency model, which viewed all other
societies as dependent on western capitalism, and instead see western primacy as essentially contextual and alternating. Take the Near East. In the
fourth or third millennium bce this area saw the birth of civilization, which
included the metal age and the birth of written culture, with its complex
forms of exchange and of accounts. Accounting certainly did not begin with
the double-entry of Webers Protestants nor even with Marxs capitalism, nor
yet with the Italian Renaissance. It is of course the case that the Near East
did not seem to develop a complex industrial economy in the manner of
nineteenth-century Europe, to which it had earlier exported urban society.
But then it did not have the supply of metals, of wood and coal, and of water,
nor did it have any longer such a central place in the growing system
19 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982).

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Anthropologys contribution to world history

of international exchange. The ideology and the desire were there, the
resources were not. While later differences, although not irrelevant, were
marginal, the important factor is that from the perspective of the written
cultures of Eurasia, all civilizations of the cultures of cities derive, as Childe
and other archaeologists have maintained, from a common origin in the
Bronze Age of the Ancient Near East.
Comparative history is not only about the history of these written societies, much less of modern ones. If it dwells only on those, it will concentrate upon differences in the Industrial Age for example, without getting to
grips with the commonalities in earlier societies, especially in written ones.
That latter procedure would tend to emphasize the common factors, in those
in the east and the west, instead of searching for differences, as Malthus and
many others have done. They existed, of course, but not in the way that
western history has maintained. Only a world historical approach enables
us to see these later divergences in a proper context, and how these have
proved temporary especially with the emergence of China and India as
great manufacturing powers. The usual western account sees this emergence
as being the result of the migration of capitalism. This account is to give a
much too limited interpretation of that concept and to disregard the fact that
China was the greatest exporter of manufactured products until the end of
the eighteenth century, and that India too was an exporter of steel in the
Roman period as well as of painted cottons over a long period. To dismiss
these nations as peripheral in relation to a western core is a peculiarly
ethnocentric view based on the strictly temporary superiority of the latters
methods in the late eighteenth century, a view that tends to regard that
particular situation as permanent and as connected with ethnicity rather than
circumstance. But it clearly was not, neither in production nor in knowledge. Needham has demonstrated the great achievements of Chinese
science before the Renaissance while Indian mathematicians used more
convenient Arabic numerals to produce complex questions and answers in
the intellectual eld. The situation was not improved by those who assumed
that Europe was unique in evolving a shift either to nancial capitalism or to
a world system. It was clearly unique in the sense that all historical situations
are and in the advances it made in the Industrial Revolution but not in
the assumption that there was a unique change of system. That would be
to ignore the alternation, or rather the spiralling, that took place in the
history of all written societies. Those societies were metal-using and both this
and the writing represented points on the road to modernization rather than
a shift to a completely different mode of production such as capitalism.
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jack goody

That again was a particularly western conception that excluded a consideration of the achievements of the east in an unacceptable way. There were as
many shoots of capitalism there as in the west; and some aspects of that
system (which has been called that of petty capitalism) were rst manifested in the exchange economy of the Near East involving the written
transactions that eventually led to double-entry book-keeping. Of this Max
Weber wanted to make a special case as representing a form of rationality
that only the west possessed (or perhaps developed, though it seemed to
imply we are born with this as an ethnic characteristic).20 Many of the
arguments of both west and east have assumed this permanent character, and
indeed the very concept of culture in an anthropological context has something about it of this kind. Culture in Ruth Benedicts sense is certainly
something you learn but often it is seen in a static rather than a dynamic way
to indicate what are considered to be permanent features of a group, so that
the ethic is not simply Protestant in a historical sense but an attitude that we
acquire at birth.21 In fact the Chinese also developed that form of bookkeeping as well as philosophical rationality.

Historys contribution to anthropology


What does a historical perspective do for the anthropologist? For the eldworker, not much, especially since Malinowski tried to banish the historical
dimension as a mode of explanation for social facts. However, today it is
generally felt that this rejection should apply to what Radcliffe-Brown called
pseudo-history, that is, dynamic sequences constructed from static data
for which there is little or no evidence. It is apparent that in the explanation
of much observational work historical data should take a subordinate place.
But world history has its place if only to give a dynamic context to static
observations. For example, when I saw a friends arm being gravely
damaged in West Africa because of an exploding barrel of a gun being
red at a funeral, it is helpful to note that the smelting technology could not
produce enough heat for the welding of ordinary barrels, so people had to
rely on patched up imports, possibly from Europe. It was also true of the
porcelain fragments decorating the doorways of merchants houses: oven
heat was insufcient to make stoneware and only easily soluble
20 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (trans.)
(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1930).
21 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1989).

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Anthropologys contribution to world history

earthenware was possible before the eighteenth century either in Europe or


in Africa. So China, high-red pottery, was a valued import that could not
be made locally; even fragments were prized. Like cast iron this was a
luxury product to be brought in from the outside. These material and
spiritual differences in cultures have to be understood in world historical
terms, as does the absence of literacy except where Abrahamistic religions
had penetrated. The penetration of those religions, and their goods and
their technologies, including those of the intellect, were part of a long-term
process that was affecting Africa just as it had earlier in other parts of the
world, including Europe.
There have of course been attempts at world history in the past. Most of
the world states or world religions had some view of the other inhabitants,
as with the Islamic history of Rashid al-Din, or the Chinese dynastic histories,
but these were made very much from the point of view of the country or the
religions and were the equivalent of the primitive history of tribes such as
the Nuer who adopted a we, the people standpoint.
Today what draws the eldworker to world history? In my case it was
partly watching people at work. You cant help being struck by the relative
paucity of those in African villages compared with Indian or Eurasian ones,
paucity and the absence of some complexity. A town in Africa was a village
in India. And this was clearly related to the process of production, to the
absence of the horse and cart (because no wheel) as well as that of the plough
and of any animal traction. This was not an individual or societal difference
but one that affected whole regions, indeed continents, and demanded an
explanation, and that effectively was not forthcoming within the Weberian or
Marxist frame.
World history is human history, that is to say, it is the history of humanity.
It involves the emergence of our species from other animals, which means
taking account of stages of physical evolution and that includes not only
going back to the beginning but also going wider into human development.

further reading
Beattie, John, Other Cultures: Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology,
London: Cohen & West, 1964.
Benedict, Ruth, Patterns of Culture, Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1989.
Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, Mark Sainsbury
(trans.), London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970.
Durkheim, mile, The Division of Labour in Society, W. D. Halls (trans.), New York: Free
Press, 1997.

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jack goody
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Karen E. Fields (trans.), London: Free Press, 1995.
Suicide: A Study in Sociology, George Simpson and John A. Spaulding (trans.), London:
Routledge, 2002.
Durkheim, mile, and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classication, Rodney Needham (trans.),
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
Fortes, M., and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems, London: Oxford
University Press, 1940.
Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 12 vols., London:
Macmillan, 1915.
Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt, The consequences of literacy, Comparative Studies in Society
and History 5 (1963), 30445.
Goody, Jack, and S. J. Tambiah (eds.), Bridewealth and Dowry, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973.
Griaule, Marcel, Conversations with Ogotemmli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Lee, James Z., and Feng Wang, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese
Realities, 17002000, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, Elementary Structures of Kinship, James Harle Bell, Rodney Needham,
and John Richard von Sturmer (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Lienhardt, Ronald Godfrey, Social Anthropology, London: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Needham, Joseph, et al. (eds.), Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1954.
Pocock, David Francis, Social Anthropology, London: Sheed & Ward, 1961.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., and Daryll Forde (eds.), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage,
London: Oxford University Press, 1950.
Tylor, Edward B., Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy,
Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols., London: John Murray, 1871.
Warner, W. Lloyd, The Social Life of a Modern Community, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1941.
Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (trans.),
London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1930.
Wolf, Eric R., Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982.

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