Rethinking Anthropology (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Rethinking AnthropologyThe title of this collection properly belongs only to the first essay. On 3 December 1959 I had the honour to deliver the first Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics. The Editorial Board of the London School of Economics Monographs in Social Anthropology generously offered to publish the text of my lecture but added the flattering suggestion that I should reprint a number of my other essays at the same time. I have accordingly appropriated the title of my Malinowski lecture for the whole collection.The essays extend over a period of fifteen years and I do not pretend that the viewpoint of the latest (Chapter 1) is wholly consistent with that of the earliest (Chapter 2) but there is, I think, a certain continuity of theme and method in all of them. When they were first written all these essays were attempts to 'rethink anthropology'. All are concerned with problems of theory and are based on ethnographic facts recorded by others, my own contribution being primarily that of analyst. In each case I have tried to reassess the known facts in the light of unorthodox assumptions. Such heresy seems to me to have merit for its own sake. Unconventional arguments often turn out to be wrong but provided they provoke discussion they may still have lasting value. By that criterion each of the essays in this book is a possible candidate for attention.Among social anthropologists the game of building new theories on the ruins of old ones is almost an occupational disease. Contemporary arguments in social anthropology are built out of formulae concocted by Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss who in turn were only 'rethinking' Rivers, Durkheim and Mauss, who borrowed from Morgan, McLennan and Robertson-Smith - and so on. Sceptics may think that the total outcome of all this ratiocination adds up to very little; despite all our pedagogical subtleties, the diversities of human custom remain…