Anthropologists and Their Traditions across National Borders

`

Anthropologists and Their Traditions across National Borders

Edited by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach
Histories of Anthropology Annual, Volume 8

Histories of Anthropology Annual Series

296 pages
8 photographs, 1 illustration

Paperback

November 2014

978-0-8032-5336-0

$40.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

November 2014

978-0-8032-5687-3

$40.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

November 2014

978-0-8032-5688-0

$40.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

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.

Author Bio

Regna Darnell is the Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and First Nations Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (Nebraska, 2001) and Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist (Nebraska, 2010). Frederic W. Gleach is a senior lecturer of anthropology and the Curator of the Anthropology Collections at Cornell University. He is the author of Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Nebraska, 1997).

Praise

“Another fine contribution to the diverse histories of our field. Like all volumes in the series, Anthropologists and Their Traditions across National Borders challenges us to think beyond standard renditions of an anthropology that presumably ‘stays put’ in space and time. Exploring the work of both well-known and largely forgotten anthropologists, this volume compels us to travel into theoretical and methodological borderlands where traditions like functionalism, structuralism, and applied anthropology may not be exactly what they seem.”—Luke Eric Lassiter, author of The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography

 

Table of Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
Editors’ Introduction
1. “China to the Anthropologist”: Franz Boas, Berthold Laufer, and a Road Not Taken in Early American Anthropology
Laurel Kendall
2. A. M. Hocart: Reflections on a Master Ethnologist and His Work
Charles D. Laughlin
3. Malinowski and the “Native Question”
Mark Lamont
4. Radcliffe-Brown and “Applied Anthropology” at Cape Town and Sydney
Ian Campbell
5. "The Department Was in Some Disarray": The Politics of Choosing a Successor to S. F. Nadel, 1957
Geoffrey Gray and Doug Munro
6. An Elegy for a Structuralist Legacy: Lévi-Strauss, Cultural Relativism, and the Universal Capacities of the Human Mind
Regna Darnell
7. Lévi-Strauss's Approach to Systems of Classification: Categories in Northwest Coast Cultures
Abraham Rosman and Paula Rubel
8. Lévi-Strauss on Theoretical Thought and Universal History
Michael Asch
9. Historical Massacres and Mythical Totalities: Reading Marshall Sahlins on Two American Frontiers
Lars Rodseth
10. Anthropologists as Perpetrators and Perpetuators of Oral Tradition: The Lectures of Kenelm O. L. Burridge and Robin Ridington, Storytellers
Lindy-Lou Flynn
Book Reviews
Contributors

Also of Interest