“Delimiting Anthropology: Historical Reflections on the Boundaries of a Boundless
Discipline” – Stocking (1995)
-Many have suggested that Anthropology has a boundary problem, fragmenting off into
too many subfields.
-The American Anthropological Association’s number of recognized units had doubled in
a quarter century (1983), consisting of 15 subsidiary “societies,” 10 “associations,” 3
“councils,” 2 “sections,” 1 uncategorized group called “Culture and Agriculture,” and a
division called “General Anthropology.”
-In 1904, Franz Boas determined anthropology’s domain of knowledge to be: the
biological history of mankind; linguistics applied to people without written language, the
ethnology of people without historic records, and prehistoric archaeology, i.e. the
traditional “four fields,” or the “sacred bundle.”
-During his time, Boas stated that the origins of anthropology were “multifarious” and
were already showing “indications of its breaking up” due to their distinct characters.
-Anthropology departs from the well-know models of disciplinary development, instead
originating by processes of fusion rather than fission, from as Boas claims, three points of
view: “the historical, the classificatory, and the geographical.”
-Anthropology can be seen as the imperfect fusion of: natural history (physical
anthropology and the fieldwork tradition of socio-cultural anthropology), philological
(anthropological linguistics and the symbolic and hermeneutic anthropology), moral
philosophical (psychological and social anthropology), and antiquarian (archaeology and
folklore).
-Anthropology had a different meaning and developmental history in Europe, where in
19th century Germany, anthropology organizations were called societies for
“anthropology, ethnology, and prehistory.”
-In 1859, France founded two societies, the “anthropological” society and the
“ethnographic” society.
-In the pre-Darwinian 19th century, the first societies were devoted to “ethnology” as the
“sciences of the races,” questioning the unity or diversity of mankind (monogenism vs.
polygenism).
-After the Darwinian Revolution, “anthropology” replaced “ethnology,” incorporating
humankind into an overall evolutionary process over a long time span, looking no longer
simply at the history of “races,” but the origin and history of the human species.
-Whether thought of in evolutionary or ethnological terms, anthropology was still
concerned with evidences of race, language, culture, and archaeology, thus no less
embracive as the “ethnological” societies of before.
-Boas, seeing anthropology as an historically constituted domain, focused it on the
“people without history” but as the human sciences differentiated themselves in the 19th
century, the primary subject matter of which anthropology focused on was being lost in
the other dividing disciplines, i.e. the historical method focused only on people with
documented history; the human sciences focused only on the study of “civilized”
humankind.
-Thus anthropology tended to be the practice of those called “primitive,” regarded as
racially, mentally, and culturally inferior and thought to be “vanishing,” making
anthropology historically constituted and to some, historically delimited, based largely on
second hand information.
-Eventually, from the time of Rousseau on, the emphasis shifted to the accounts of
European travelers and residents in “uncivilized lands,” representing a problematic
disciplinary boundary between anthropology and folklore, classics, and literature of
travel, respectively.
-Although by the 1880s, anthropology had won independent section status in both the
American and British Associations for the Advancement of Science, Boas recognized the
duality of the epistemological assumption in the various subfields of anthropology, which
in his first essay in the U.S. he broke down into the archetypes of the “physicist” and the
“cosmographer.” As the 20th century approached, he recognized the validity of both
approaches, but saw the various boundaries between the sub-disciplines, traditions, and
groups within anthropology as well.
-As an anthropological organization and journal were created and anthropology
departments and faculties were developing in major universities, Boas and his students
pushed for anthropology to be considered a science enterprise
-Although the discipline remained intact, the decades after 1904 were characterized by a
boundary-marking process due to paradigm change and the “revolution in anthropology,”
critiquing the assumptions of 19th century evolutionary anthropology.
-The Boasian critique consisted of a systematic reconsideration of the idea of “race” and
of presumed “racial differences of a hierarchical or evolutionary character,” seeking to
draw a sharper boundary between race and culture and to reject both biological and
cultural determinism, often called the “debiologization of anthropology.” The boundary
continues as, cultural anthropologists resist the claims of “sociobiology.”
-Although biological analogies continued to be used in functionalist anthropology, by the
1920s anthropology in America and Britain was no longer focused on retrospective
reconstruction of developmental stages or ethnic differences, but was redefined in
synchronic terms.
-The “dehistoricization” of socio-cultural anthropology moved away from the work of
“armchair anthropologists” in the museum, and a few decades after the year 1900,
ethnography was no longer being done second hand, but instead was being carried on by
academically trained fieldworkers, no longer looking to collect artifacts but instead texts
and the observation of behavior.
-By the 1920s, “participant observation” of behavior in the “ethnographic present”
superseded textual and “memory” ethnography, focusing no longer on the “Amongtha”
tribes but rather on “My People.”
-From this ethnographic revolution, the “methodological values” of anthropology arose,
placing value on: fieldwork as constitutive of anthropological knowledge and
anthropologists, a holistic approach to the people being studied, a relativistic valuation of
such entities, and their uniquely privileged role in the construction of anthropological
theory.
-However, the “Amongtha” values still persist, placing emphasis on: the systematic
comparative study of human variation, general statements about the nature and cause of
human diversity, the “scientific” character of the venture, and the integration of a number
of approaches into a single discipline.
-During the interwar periods, the sub-disciplines began establishing their own
organizations and publication outlets.
-By the 1930s, former “ethnologists” began calling themselves “cultural (or “social in
Britain) anthropologists” in departments of “sociology and anthropology,” leading
however to more traditional “four-field” anthropology departments. During this time
Lloyd Warner, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict explored the possibility of
ethnography in “complex societies” as the study of “culture at a distance.
-In the post-war period, anthropology shifted tendencies of a more rigorous,
comparativist, universalist, scientific disciplines as evidenced by the Wenner-Gren
Anthropology Today symposium of 1952. The discipline was shown to be moving
beyond the social relevance of critiquing ethnocentric and racial assumption, to interest in
the “problems of the application” of anthropological knowledge in industry and in
government.
-As Eric Wolf proclaimed in 1963, anthropology was seeing a resurgence of the
“Enlightenment themes,” of predictability and standardization, retreating from the
“unlimited flexibility” of human nature toward an emphasis on cultural universals as
against relativity, focusing of the “development of civilization,” with an interest in
applied anthropology, while standing “on the threshold of a scientifically informed
conception of the human career as a universal process.”
-The internationalizing tendency manifest in the Wenner-Gren symposium and their
world-wide journal, Current Anthropology, established the basis for “world
anthropology” with the values of participant-observation, with a commitment to “general
anthropology” and the UNESCO values of humanist liberal anti-racism.
-In the last third of the 20th century, historical forces helped redefine the shifting
boundaries of anthropology: the end of colonialism, the U.S. cold war involvement, the
U.S. involvement in postcolonial Southeast Asia and the counter-cultural and political
resistance of young people in advance capitalist countries.
-Due to changing restrictions and social change, the recovery of uncontaminated nonEuropean “otherness’ as the substantive focus of anthropology was no longer realistic.
-The methodological and epistemological assumptions of ethnographic fieldwork and the
positive assumption in the human sciences were called into question and the 1970s saw a
“reinvention of anthropology,” calling for it to “bring it all home.”
-Moving away from the posture of relativistic tolerance, anthropology focused more on
the struggles of the powerless against the holders of power, rejected the positivistic
assumption that cultures or behavior could be observed as “objects,” recognized the
reflexivity of participant observation and the problems with the knowledge gathered by
the ethnographic process, allowing a role for human agency.
-The volume, Reinventing Anthropology, reflected the developments redefining the
boundaries of anthropology, reinforced by poststructuralist and deconstructionist thought:
Marxist thought, study of resistance movements, impact of the world ecological crisis,
focus on minority groups, etc.
-Institutionally, the sub-disciplines no longer remained frozen in the structure of the
academic departments, and turned towards the problems of the contemporary world.
-The situation facing ethnographers in the 1930s and the 1990s is very different.
Although ethnographic anthropology still practices in the spirit of “My People” values,
the status of the knowledge produced has been called into question and reanalyzed. A
blurring has occurred with the boundaries of ethnographic objects, moving the focus from
small scale to “complex” societies, once again incorporating the small-scale societies into
the world historical processes. The terms of access have been redefined and the process
of inquiry has become more “self-reflexive” and “dialogic.” The number of theoretical
issues has expanded as the range of ethnographic material and relevant theoretical
literature has increased, with a shifting and blurring of disciplinary boundaries
-Presumably transcultural anthropological categories such as: kinship, economics,
politics, and religion, have been dismissed as “embedded in European culture.” Even the
term “culture” has been called into question, seen as the mirror image of the traditional
racialist assumption, but it has been used as a badge of identity for minorities, who can in
effect, “choose” their cultures.
-Despite the “debiologization” in the past century, forecasters see an interface of the
biological and cultural once again. They claim that a “re-historicization” of anthropology
has been under way for decades as historical materials and analysis are major
components of contemporary anthropological inquiry.
-The claim by William Maitland that anthropology will have to choose “between being
history and being nothing,” is countered by critics who point to ethnographic fieldwork as
still a distinguishing feature of anthropological inquiry, and the academic specialization
of anthropology as remaining, in institutional terms, strongly defined.
-The “academicization” of anthropology has undergone a reversal, with 50% of
doctorates in anthropology working in academic settings in 1994-1995, down from 87%
in the 1970s. The dominance of Euro-Americans in the field has slightly reduced and the
proportion of women doctorates has increased from 32% in 1972 to 59% in 1995.
-Despite Boas’ claims that biological and linguistic anthropology would split, the subdisciplinary components have remained “relatively stable” with few departments
separating.
-At the end of the 20th century, the issue of “science” in anthropology has been a widely
debated topic, forcing even the journal American Anthropologist to recast the
“science/postmodernism” conflict in the terms of “science and humanity,” after an article
in 1994 suggesting a “postmodern” threat to the “positivism” in archaeology.
-However, throughout anthropology in general, “science” is valued, especially in
archaeology and biological anthropology.
-For those worried about anthropology’s place in the future, the AAA is devoted to what
they call the “dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human
problems.”