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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
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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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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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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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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. . .
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
275
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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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