Full Description
Volume 8 of the Histories of Anthropology Annual series, the premier series published in the history of the discipline, explores national anthropological traditions in Britain, the United States, and Europe and follows them into postnational contexts. Contributors reassess the major theorists in twentieth-century anthropology, including the work of luminaries such as Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bronisław Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Marshall Sahlins, as well as lesser-known but important anthropological work by Berthold Laufer, A. M. Hocart, Kenelm O. L. Burridge, and Robin Ridington, among others.
These essays examine myriad themes such as the pedagogical context of the anthropologist as a teller of stories about indigenous storytellers; the colonial context of British anthropological theory and its projects outside the nation-state; the legacies of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism regarding culture- specific patterns; cognitive universals reflected in empirical examples of kinship, myth, language, classificatory systems, and supposed universal mental structures; and the career of Marshall Sahlins and his trajectory from neo-evolutionism and structuralism toward an epistemological skepticism of cross- cultural miscommunication.
Contents
ContentsList of IllustrationsEditors' Introduction1. "China to the Anthropologist": Franz Boas, Berthold Laufer, and a Road Not Taken in Early American AnthropologyLaurel Kendall2. A. M. Hocart: Reflections on a Master Ethnologist and His WorkCharles D. Laughlin3. Malinowski and the "Native Question"Mark Lamont4. Radcliffe-Brown and "Applied Anthropology" at Cape Town and SydneyIan Campbell5. "The Department Was in Some Disarray": The Politics of Choosing a Successor to S. F. Nadel, 1957Geoffrey Gray and Doug Munro6. An Elegy for a Structuralist Legacy: LÉvi-Strauss, Cultural Relativism, and the Universal Capacities of the Human MindRegna Darnell7. LÉvi-Strauss's Approach to Systems of Classification: Categories in Northwest Coast CulturesAbraham Rosman and Paula Rubel8. LÉvi-Strauss on Theoretical Thought and Universal HistoryMichael Asch9. Historical Massacres and Mythical Totalities: Reading Marshall Sahlins on Two American FrontiersLars Rodseth10. Anthropologists as Perpetrators and Perpetuators of Oral Tradition: The Lectures of Kenelm O. L. Burridge and Robin Ridington, StorytellersLindy-Lou FlynnBook ReviewsContributors
