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- Convenor:
-
David Shankland
(Royal Anthropological Institute)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Anthropology
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 11
- Start time:
- 21 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel invites consideration of how and when anthropology has appeared to have divided into sub-disciplines, and whether such sub-divisions are still relevant today. Submissions are welcome from the historical, methodological, or theoretical point of view.
Long Abstract:
For much of its history, anthropology was regarded by its practitioners as a single discipline. By the second half of the twentieth century, this conception of a unified subject appears to have been very much weakened. When, however, and why did this internal separation take place? Was it triggered by any one factor, or were there multiple causes which gradually led to a mutual drifting apart? Were the same factors operative, for instance, in the separation of biological anthropology from social anthropology as there were in separating anthropology from archaeology? Perhaps it may be possible to argue that the subjects were never as close as all that, and a unified discipline was never more than a convenient heuristic device? Yet, it does also seem the case that in certain ways anthropology today can be brought together again, and there have been notable rapprochements between different sub-parts of the discipline. Papers are invited that consider any aspect of this fascinating conundrum, whether from the historical, methodological, contemporary or even future point of view. Detailed case studies of particular events, periods or lives are welcome, as are wider overviews.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nicholas Allen (Oxford University)
Paper short abstract:
Over the last half century the writer has engaged in four branches of anthropology. The different styles of imagination involved are here explored, and it is argued that an anthropological education can and should continue to allow for such variety.
Paper long abstract:
This case study of one anthropologist (myself) is intended less to advertise a bibliography than to consider how different sub-disciplines have interacted in a single career. How far do they express a single style of curiosity, such as can be expected of a unitary discipline?
My original orientation was Himalayan ethnography. Apart from ordinary tribal ethnography, the aim was to imagine the Thulung Rai less in themselves than as representing non-literary Tibeto-Burman speakers ‒ much time was devoted to the language. Via kinship terminologies, this led on to kinship studies. My imagination focused on the logically simplest type of human kinship system, an issue potentially useful for biological anthropology. A third interest was in disciplinary history -- in Durkheim and, above all, Mauss. I tried to imagine Mauss's mental world, and to take further some of his theoretical insights. Finally, this led on to Indo-European Cultural Comparison and the attempt to imagine the early Indo-European myths and epics from which Homer and the Sanskrit Mahābhārata derive. Such work, necessarily interdisciplinary, takes its comparative dimension from anthropology as well as from philology, and its approach is surely applicable to other language families.
I am not claiming that this particular career is somehow exemplary ‒ rather that the different sub-disciplines can interact fruitfully, and that future generations should not be denied the encouragement and opportunity to move around within the framework of a unitary discipline. Personally I have gained particular inspiration from the world-historical conceptions of Mauss.
David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This paper concentrates on the creation of separate fields of anthropological enquiry in the first half of the twentieth century, and reflects upon the lessons that this can teach us in the present day.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines anthropology and its creation as a modern discipline at the turn of the nineteenth century and later, attempting to look at internal disagreements and arguments which led to fission, as well as the impulses which led toward attempts to keep it together. My perspective is influenced by my present position as Director of the RAI, as well as by research conducted in Oxford as Humfrey Wanley Bodleian Visiting Fellow. I certainly believe that treating anthropology as a single discipline far outweighs any disadvantages that such a perspective may hold, all the more so if one takes into account the kind of questions that were being asked as it began to divide.
Katie Meheux (UCL Institute of Archaeology)
Paper short abstract:
Conventional histories of the professionalization of Archaeology in Britain have ignored the major contribution of late Victorian scholars and the enduring influence and colonial context of their practice and ideas about progress, science, class, race, modernity and rational recreation.
Paper long abstract:
The professionalization of Archaeology in Britain is widely accepted by historians of the subject to have taken place between the wars, as a dynamic generation of new archaeologists, the 'golden generation' or 'heroic band', including O.G.S. Crawford, Vere Gordon Childe, Mortimer Wheeler, Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott modernised and professionalised a hitherto amateur pursuit to create an exciting new 'age of excavation'. This paper questions the extent to which this picture is a deliberate and misleading construct created by the group themselves. This manipulation has obscured the vital groundwork done by individuals in the previous generation, notably Sir John L. Myres, Sir William Flinders Petrie, Sir Frederic Kenyon, Sir Charles Peers and Harold Peake, who began the process of separating archaeology from anthropology, folk-lore, history and heraldic studies and turning it into a progressive and independent 'science'. Working within established societies, these individuals sponsored the new progressive archaeologists and manoeuvred them into positions of authority from which they were able to generated change, albeit not without challenge from older, influential amateurs. Many of the features we associate with 'professional' archaeology came from this earlier generation and reflected Victorian ideas about progress, science, class, race, modernity and rational recreation. They were, furthermore, developed not in Britain but within a colonial context, in Britain's imperial 'possessions', where archaeology and heritage were used as elements of colonial government and in the promotion of 'authentic' cultural identities. Professionalising archaeology in Britain involved rendering 'colonial' practices fit for purpose 'at home'.