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Here the critics have seized upon a brief moment in thehistory of anthropology,an important but limited episodein British anthropology, and have projected this momentonto the whole of the field in both Britain and America.They have succeeded so well that it seems mandatory forgraduate student proposals, papers, and dissertations (atthe University of Wisconsin-Madison, at least) to beginwith words to the effect that "anthropology always ignoredhistory, but now we know better and I will really introduce history in my work."A disturbing number of their elders have accepted this idea as well.It is true that, for particular the oretical reasons, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski argued that it was unnecessary,and probably impossible, to reconstruct histories inorder to do scientific analyses of societies and cultureswithout written records. But as influential as they were inEngland for a while, this view never won acceptance inAmerica In the United States, from the time Franz Boas beganteaching in the 1890s, history became of paramount concernfor the large majority of working anthropologists. In so faras the Boas "school" has a name it is the AmericanHistorical school. Boas, Kroeber,Wissler,E . C. Parsons,Bunzel, Dixon, Lowie, Goldenweiser, Sapir, Spier,Herskovits, Linton, Murdock, Lesser, and many others arguedabout history, urged its study, worked out methodsfor recapturing the unwritten past, and complained aboutthe absence of historicity in the schemes of the evolutionistsand diffusionists whom they criticized. They regularlyand normally incorporated history into much of what theydid, and they worked in departments together with archaeologistswhose major concern was history. In one of his many farsighted papers, Boas argued forthe importance of the study of history and historical processesfor future progress in anthropology. In 1920 hewrote,In order to understand history it is necessary to know not onlyhow things are, but how they have come to be.... It is truethat we can never hope to obtain incontrovertible data relatingto the chronological sequence of events, but certain broad outlinescan be ascertained with a high degree of probability,even of certainty.As soon as these methods are applied, primitive societyloses the appearance of absolute stability which is conveyedto the student who sees a certain people only at a certain giventime. All cultural forms rather appear in a constant state offlux and subject to fundamental modifications. [ 19 20:3 1$315,emphasis added]Melville J. Herskovits,throughout his career,railed at"the ahistorical approach to the Negro past," arguingagainst the myth that the Negro had no history. And, moregenerally, he would get furious at those who failed to recognizethat all peoples had been on earth equally long."We cannot too often emphasize the fact we might saythe axiom that no living culture is static," he wrote(1948:479); all had complex histories. For this reason hewould not accept the idea that a living hunting and gatheringpeople could be used to represent the conditions of anearlier evolutionary stage. Ironically, a small but vocalband of critics of anthropology has recently come forwardarguing that the Bushmen of southwest Africa have had along and complex history that anthropologist ignored asthey constructed the Bushmen according to their own imagesand politics (see Barnard 1992, Kuper 1993 for reviewsof the Great Kalahari Debate). Is this MelHerskovits's revenge?Faced with the evidence of the historical concerns ofBoas, Kroeber, and their ilk, some critics respond, in effect:"But that was before Benedict and Mead and the Britishfunctionalists who wiped out all history.''? But that isnot true either. Anyone who studied anthropology in theUnited States in the 1 950s knows that history was a naturaland normal part of the field in those days. Julian Steward'smultilineal evolution was, of course, informed by andconcerned with history as well as with evolution. Stewardhoped to derive cross-cultural and evolutionary generalizations from the study of culture-historical particulars. At Columbia, where I went to graduate school, the courses and discourses of people like Morton Fried, ConradArensberg, Joseph Greenberg, Charles Wagley, andHaroldConklin were saturated with history. My own dissertationresearch (begun in 1 958) involved a combinationof ethnographic fieldwork and historical reconstruction,using both written materials and oral testimony. No oneever told me it was at all unusual and I had no problem gettingfunding for fieldwork from the Ford Foundation orgetting it published in 1965.To repeat, only through ignorance willful or notcan it be maintained that American anthropology was evergenerally ahistorical, while the famous ahistoricity ofBritish anthropology was confined to a relatively short period,and by no means involved or included all of its practitioners.Even such prominent British Afiicanists as IsaacShapera,E vans-PritchardM, . G. Smith,J ohnB arnes,S . F.Nadel,and I an Cunnison published historical studies.It is particularly ironic that the critics who claim that anthropologyis ahistorical should themselves treat the historyof anthropology so cavalierly, so amateurishly, andso out-of-keeping with the historicist spirit (see Stocking[1968] for a concise discussion of this problem). Fabian'sgross characterization of the field in Time and the Other isa prime example. It is even more striking, given the supposednew emphasis on history, that sweeping statementslike these go unexamined and unchallenged.Here is another example of such a claim. Marcus andFischer write that after World War II, when "Americaemerged as the dominant economic force.... Parsoniansociology became a hegemonic framework, not merelyfor sociology, but for anthropology, psychology, politicalscience, and models of economic development as well"(1986:10). This is an astonishing claim, and it would bevery interesting to see them attempt to demonstrate it withevidence derived from such sources as anthropologicalworks produced from a Parsonian perspective, anthropologists'citations of Parsons, or course offerings in aParsonian mode. Such an investigation would show thatParsonian sociology was never that influential in anthropology,let alone hegemonic, unless "hegemonic" means"some what popular at Harvard and Chicago. "Parsons hadsome influence for a time among students at the HarvardDepartment of Social Relations, notably on DavidSchneider and Clifford Geertz, and perhaps, as the resultof the migration of these two, at Chicago (Schneider1995: 82-83). It was certainly not the reigning paradigm inthe anthropology departments at Arizona, Berkeley, Columbia,Cornell, Michigan, North Carolina, Northwestern,Pennsylvania, Stanford, UCLA, or Yale, to name themajor graduate schools of that period. Even a cursory examinationof the programs of the annual meetings of theAAA in the 19 50s, or of the American Anthropologist andthe Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, the majorAmerican journals of that time, OI- of the AAA Guide to Departmentsof Anthropology, first issued in 196243, willshow how unlikely this assertion is."Such statements call for examination, not casual acceptance.The representation of anthropology's history andnature has become a major element in much of the recenttheoretical literature, and it is time to subject these constructionsto the same critical scrutiny that we should giveto any other truth claims.
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