THEY DIVIDE AND SUBDIVIDE, AND

CALL IT ANTHROPOLOGY
BYLINE: By ERIC WOLF

SECTION: Section 4; Page 9, Column 1; Week in Review Desk

LENGTH: 1929 words

On Wednesday, the anthropologists of North America will

foregather in the nation's capital for the 79th annual meeting of
their tribal union, the American Anthropological Association. The
proceedings of that meeting will surprise those who hold a
traditional image of anthropology. This image grew out of widely
read books, written by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in the
1930's, which depicted primitive cultures as personalities ''writ
large'' and argued that each culture produces a characteristic
pattern of individual development. Dr. Mead drew on her field
work in Samoa and New Guinea to address a wide range of public
issues in our own society, becoming a spokesman for what
anthropology could offer the world at large.
That approach has not been central to anthropology for many
years, but Dr. Mead herself continued to play an important role
as a tribal elder. Her death two years ago symbolically closed an
earlier chapter in American anthropology. During her lifetime, the
discipline became less a vocation and more a profession, and
moved toward increasing specialization. Specialization brought
fragmentation, which in turn has raised a troublesome question:
What, these days, constitutes the discipline of anthropology?

Although American anthropology is still distinguished from other

traditions by its ''four-field approach,'' the practitioners of those
fields - archeologists, linguists, physical anthropologists and
social or cultural anthropologists - increasingly have pulled apart,
meeting and publishing separately. Social-cultural
anthropologists have also split into subdivisions, turning
themselves into applied, cognitive, economic, ecological, legal,
political, psychological, urban, or even psycho-pharmacological
anthropologists. Area specialization has grouped anthropologists
working in a particular geographical area with, say, Latin
Americanists or Middle Easternists from other disciplines. Such
lines of tension were deepened by opposition between older and
younger members of the profession, between anthropologists at
the ''major'' and at the ''minor'' institutions, and between those
teaching within academe and those working outside. Moreover,
conflicts during the 1960's over the role of anthropology in the
American involvement in Southeast Asia and the developing
issues of affirmative action exacerbated the other fissures.
Yet this restlessness of the tribe is intellectual as well as
professional. An earlier anthropology had achieved unity under
the aegis of the culture concept. It was culture, in the view of
anthropologists, that distinguished humankind from all the rest of
the universe, and it was the possession of varying cultures that
differentiated one society from another. Each people was seen as
having a distinctive, internally coherent repertoire of artifacts and
customs, which - passed from generation to generation - created
an enduring compact between the living and the dead. Looking at
culture in this way, anthropologists had found seemingly secure
explanations of why people behaved in certain ways and not
others: it was ''in their culture.'' Similarly, changes in the way
people behaved could be accounted for by pointing to changes
''in their culture.'' Other disciplines, especially psychology,
sociology and history, acknowledged anthropology's special juris
diction over the study of cultural phen omena.
The past quarter-century has undermined this intellectual sense
of security. The relatively inchoate concept of ''culture'' was
attacked from several theoretical directions. As the social
sciences transformed themselves into ''behavioral'' sciences,
explanations for behavior were no longer traced to culture;
behavior was to be understood in terms of psychological
encounters, strategies of economic choice, strivings for payoffs in
games of power. Culture, once extended to all acts and ideas
employed in social life, was now relegated to the margins as
''world view'' or ''values.'' In 1958, the anthropologist Alfred
Kroeber, long associated with the University of California at
Berkeley, and the Harvard University sociologist Talcott Parsons,
each the dean of his respective profession, drew up a joint
statement on the concepts of culture and of social system,
restricting culture to ''values, ideas, and other symbolic-
meaningful systems.'' In the division of spoils, sociology was
permitted to claim all the social action and anthropology retained
the residual ''values.''
Soon afterward there came word from Paris that Claude Levi-
Strauss had done away w ith the notion of distinctive cultures
altogether. ForLevi-Strauss, culture was generated neither i n
human action oriented toward practical ends nor in the passing
on o f cultural forms from generation to generation, but in the
convolut ions of the human brain.This brain, common to all
humans, continuousl y spawns logical and analogical oppositions,
forever replacing bin ary opposites already installed with new
ones, in an ultimately fru itless round - fruitlessbecause the
human brain cannot transcend the matrix of nature that had
given rise to it.
A third movement assailed the concept of culture itself. In the
50's, the anthropological study of how cultures adapted to and
used their physical environments had produced a ''cultural
ecology'' that concerned itself with the specifically cultural acts
and artifacts deployed in the transformation of the natural world.
In the 60's, however, this cultural ecology increasingly gave way
to a general ecological approach, which began to treat humans
as organisms among other organisms - measuring, for example,
the intake and expenditure of calories in different environments.
Such an approach abrogated the boundary between the human
and the nonhuman aspects of the world and threatened to deal
with culture as just another organismic appendage, like the sonar
radar of the bat or the antlers of the Irish stag.
The upshot of this revision and displacement of the traditional
culture concept has been an acrimonious debate between
''materialists'', who claim to study the observable behaviors
involved in concrete action, and students of meaning, who claim
to study the mental universes constructed by the natives
themselves. Each side actually represents a variety of different
positions but gains a spurious unity in denigrating the opposition.
Marvin Harris, who now teaches at the University of Florida, and
who is the most vigorous spokesman for materialism, castigates
the ''obscurantists'' and ''eclectics'' bent on impeding the
''struggle'' to transform anthropology into a science of human
social life. His opponents counter by deriding Harris's attempts to
reduce the complexities of culture to mechanical processes of
protein consumption or population control. The main prescription
for the further study of meaning, by Clifford Geertz, a resident at
the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, calls for the
''reading'' of cultures as ''texts.'' Offered a choice between
biological reductionism and literary criticism, most
anthropologists have preferred to go about their work
unencumbered by theoretical consistency.
Luckily so, perhaps, for the strength of anthropology has always
lain in its eclecticism, or - what may be the same thing - its
respect for reality. The anthropological enterprise grew out of the
confrontation of the West with variegated and unfamiliar cultures
elsewhere. For anthropologists, the arrangements of the Western
world will always remain but one set of possibilities among
others; a new and unexpected configuration is always waiting
across the next tributary of the Amazon or the next Papuan
mountain - or in the next neighborhood of their own home town.
To learn about yet another set of human possibilities demands
prolonged engagement with and patient apprenticeship to the
people one hopes to understand.
The result of anthropology's eclecticism is that the field continues
to astound by its diverse and colorful activity. New findings are
reported about Bushman demography, the use of hallucinogens
in tropical South America, the decipherment of Mayan
hieroglyphics. Anthropologists are now as likely to study peasant
and urban subcultures as those of primitives, and increasingly
they are investigating how such cultures are remolded by their
inclusion into larger regional, national and global systems.
Feminist concerns are generating new research on the import of
gender in different cultures, not only uncovering specifically
female domains of culture but also altering our understanding of
the male domains. Despite the challenge of increasing
specialization to the ''four-field aproach,'' it continues to open up
new avenues of inquiry. Thus, a ''new'' archeology makes use of
ecology and ethnography, as well as sophisticated quantitative
methods, to build models of the past. Current appro aches to
human evolution interpret the fossil record by drawing on ar
cheology, ecology, comparative studies of social behavior, and
the ethnology of still-extant hunters and gatherers. Studies of me
aning employ methods derived from structural linguistics.
Ethnohistory joins the study of written documents to oral history,
archeology, linguistic reconstruction, and consideration s of
political economy. Beyond the academy, anthropologis ts working
in health care, education, social services and a variety of other
settings bring their special skills of observation a nd diagnosis to
bear on an understanding of complex institutions. The annual
meeting operates as a giant fair, in which these diverse activities
and their results are exhibited, discussed and savored.
Yet this multifarious activity is accompanied by a sense of
unease, which feeds on that very proliferation of purposes and
tasks. What was once a secular church of believers in the
primacy of Culture has now become a holding company of
diverse interests, defined by what the members do rather than
by what they do it for. There are unvoiced concerns within the
profession about what anthropology has become and where it is
headed. The old culture concept is moribund. But in its time, it
unified the discipline around a concern with basic questions about
the nature of the human species, its biologicaland socially
learned variability, and the pro per ways to assess the similarities
and differences. Ultimately, a d iscipline draws its energy from
the questions it asks. Whether an thropology's basic questions
are still those that marked its beg innings or new ones, the task
of articulating them may be the meet ing's hidden agenda.