HENRY

I have just read a rather wonderful paper by Robert L. Carneiro (personal website) - “Can anthropology be made a science? A retrospective glance” - which is a look back at his long career in Anthropology.

I’ve excerpted a quote here which I think (unfortunately) sums up a common viewpoint in anthropology and linguistics. The quote by Murdock is a little bit stronger than how I’d put it though!

Although warfare occurred in both the Amazon and the Andes, it had, as I said, led to very different outcomes in the two regions. In Amazonia, it often resulted in a process of ‘fight and flight,’ causing defeated villages to flee to safety and spread out over an extensive area, thus retaining their independence. On the Peruvian coast, however, the situation was very different. Here, villages were located, not in open country, but in a number of narrow valleys, hemmed in - circumscribed - by deserts, mountains, and the sea. Intervillage warfare occurred here too, as it did in Amazonia, but as population grew, and proliferating villages filled up each coastal valley, there was no longer any place for a village, defeated in war, to flee and find safety. Unlike the Amazon, warfare here led to the conquest and incorporation of the weaker villages by the stronger. In this manner, village autonomy was surmounted, and chiefdoms, the first multi-village polities, created.

The establishment of the first chiefdoms represented a quantum leap in political evolution. A Rubicon had been crossed that needed to be crossed before any further political development was possible. A qualitative advance had taken place, and after that, the building up of successively larger political units was, in a sense, but a quantitative step. It took three million years for local autonomy to be transcended, but once it was, the state followed on the heels of the chiefdom in a scant three millennia.

In a nutshell, then, this was the circumscription theory. It must have first crystallized in my mind by the spring semester of 1957, since I remember discussing it at lunch with C. W. M. Hart, a colleague of mine at the University of Wisconsin, where I was teaching. I recall the occasion vividly because Hart’s reaction to the theory took me completely aback. While never a student of Boas, Hart’s thinking was very much along Boasian lines - critical and anti-theoretical. After I’d carefully explained my theory to him, his immediate response was to say, ‘Well, we don’t know very much about the central Congo, and if we did, perhaps we would find an exception to it there.’

What a telling remark! Departure from a theory was to be eagerly sought and warmly welcomed because, it would seem, the exception was nobler than the rule. Nor was Hart’s reaction unique. I have known more than one anthropologist since then who finds irregularities more congenial than regularities. That is why, according to Murdock (1957:251), anthropologists had gained the reputation among other social scientists of being ‘a detestable bunch of bubble prickers.’

Why should such an attitude exist? Perhaps because an irregularity in behavior seems, somehow, like a perverse manifestation of human freedom, a refusal of ‘the human spirit’ to be confined within a procrustean mold.

I’ve had Carneiro’s book Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A critical history strongly recommended to me, and it’s on my shortlist for holiday reading.

Posted on December 20th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill