The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences
Herbert S. Lewis
Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706
Search for more papers by this authorHerbert S. Lewis
Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Critiques of anthropology from within the discipline and from without have been a major feature of our intellectual life since the late 1960s. The theoretical and empirical bases of cultural and social anthropology have been under attack since the Marxist and New Left critiques of the 1960s to those coming more recently from poststructuralism, postmodernist and literary theory, and postcolonial and cultural studies. As a result, several academic generations have been educated by reading the attacks on the field but rarely dealing with the actual theoretical works and ethnographies of earlier anthropologists. This article deals with several of the most common charges leveled at anthropology, notably that it has regularly and necessarily exoticized "Others," has been ahistorical, and has treated each culture as if it were an isolate, unconnected to any other. It demonstrates how inaccurate and easily falsifiable such claims are and recommends a critical reevaluation of these unexamined and destructive cliches,
References Cited
- Abu-Lughod, Lila 1991 Writing against Culture. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Richard G. Fox, ed. Pp. 137–160. SantaFe , NM : School of American Research.
- Appell, George N. 1992 Scholars, True Believers, and the Identity Crisis in American Anthropology. Reviews in Anthropology 21: 193–202.
10.1080/00988157.1992.9978032 Google Scholar
- Talal Asad, ed. 1973 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London : Ithaca Press.
- Barnard, Alan 1992 The Kalahari Debate: A Bibliographical Essay. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.
- Barnard, F.M. 1965 Herder's Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism. Oxford : Clarendon.
- William Bascom, and Melville J. Herskovits, eds. 1959 Continuity and Change in African Cultures. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
- Bemal, Martin 1987 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece. New Brunswick , NJ : Rutgers University Press.
- Bemal, Martin 1991 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick , NJ : Rutgers University Press.
- Bernstein, Richard J. 1992 The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodemity. Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.
- Thomas Biolsi, ed. 1997 Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology. Tucson : University of Arizona Press.
- Boas, Franz 1887 Review of Die Welt in ihren Spiegelungen unter dem Wandel des Völkergedankens. Science 10: 284.
- Boas, Franz 1902 The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. International Congress of Americanists, Thirteenth Session: 91–100.
- Boas, Franz 1908 Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needle-Cases: A Study in the History of Conventional Designs, Based on Materials in the U. S. National Museum. Proceedings of the U. S. National Museum 34: 321–344.
10.5479/si.00963801.34-1616.321 Google Scholar
- Boas, Franz 1911 The Mind of Primitive Man. New York : Macmillan.
- Boas, Franz 1920 The Methods of Ethnology. American Anthropologist 22: 311–321.
10.1525/aa.1920.22.4.02a00020 Google Scholar
- Boas, Franz 1918] 1945 The Mental Attitude of the Educated Classes. In F. Boas, Race and Democratic Society. Pp. 133–140. New York : J. J. Augustin.
- Borofsky, Robert 1993 Assessing Cultural Anthropology. New York : McGraw-Hill.
- Brightman, Robert A. 1995 Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification. Cultural Anthropology 10: 509–546.
- Brown, Bernard E. 1974 Protest in Paris: Anatomy of a Revolt. Morristown , NJ : General Learning Press.
- Bunzel, Ruth 1952 Chichicastenango: A Guatemalan Village. New York : J. J. Augustin.
- Bush, Ronald 1995 The Presence of the Past Ethnographic Thinking/Literary Politics. In Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds. Pp. 32–41. Stanford , CA : Stanford University Press.
- Chapman, Charlotte Gower 1971 Milocca: A Sicilian Village. Cambridge , MA : Schenkman Publishing.
- Coronil, Fernando 1995 Introduction to the Duke University Press Edition. In Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Fernando Ortiz, ed. Pp. ix–lvi. Durham , NC : Duke University Press.
- D'Andrade, Roy 1995 Moral Models in Anthropology. Current Anthropology 36: 399–408.
- Darnton, Robert 1997 George Washington's False Teeth. New York Review of Books 44(5): 34–38.
- Nicholas B. Dirks, ed. 1992 Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press.
10.3998/mpub.9302 Google Scholar
- Ebihara, May 1985 American Ethnology in the 1930s: Contexts and Currents. In Social Contexts of American Ethnology, 1840–1984. June Helm, ed. Pp. 101–121. Washington , DC : American Ethnological Society.
- Edgar, Adrienne 1993 Review of Writing Women's Worlds. New York : Times Book Review 98 (January 31): 11–12.
- Elizabeth Edwards, ed. 1992 Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. New Haven , CT : Yale University Press.
- Epstein, A. L. 1992 Scenes from African Urban Life: Collected Copperbelt Papers. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.
- Escobar, Arturo 1993 The Limits of Reflexivity: Politics in Anthropology' s Post-Writing Culture Era. Review article based on Recapturing Anthropology. Richard G. Fox, ed. Journal of Anthropological Research 49: 377–391.
- Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York : Columbia University Press.
- Faris, James C. 1996 Navajo and Photography: A Critical History of the Repesentation of an American People. Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press.
- Ferry, Luc, and Alain Renaut 1990 French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism. Mary S. Cattani, trans. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press.
- Forster, Peter 1973 Empiricism and Imperialism: A Review of the New Left Critique of Social Anthropology. In Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Talal Asad, ed. Pp. 23–38. London : Ithaca Press.
- Richard G. Fox, ed. 1991 Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe , NM : School of American Research.
- Frank, Andre Gunder discussant 1990 Culture in Process: Factors Shaping Continuity and Change, Part 2. Session at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, November 29.
- Geertz, Clifford 1973 The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man. In The Interpretation of Cultures. Pp. 33–54. New York : Basic Books.
- Gluckman, Max 1968 The Utility of me Equilibrium Model in the Analysis of Social Change. American Anthropologist 70: 219–237.
- Goldschmidt, Walter R. 1947 As You Sow. New York : Harcourt Brace.
- Goody, Jack 1995 The Expansive Moment: The Rise of British Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
10.1017/CBO9780511557927 Google Scholar
- Gordon, Robert J. 1997 Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925. Athens , OH : Ohio University Press.
- Gough, Kathleen 1968 New Proposals for Anthropologists. Current Anthropology 9: 403–407.
- Haraway, Donna 1989 Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modem Science. New York : Routledge.
- Hellmann, Ellen 1948 Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum Yard. Cape Town : Oxford University Press.
- Hermstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray 1994 The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York : The Free Press.
- Herskovits, Melville J. 1948 Man and His Works. New York : Alfred A. Knopf. Hulme, Peter 1995 Elegy for a Dying Race: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors. In Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean. Neil L. Whitehead, ed. Pp. 61–89. Leiden: KITLV.
- Hume, David [1777] 1965 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In Essential Works of David Hume. Ralph Cohen, ed. Pp. 44–167. New York : Bantam Books.
- Hunter, Monica 1936 Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa. London : Oxford University Press.
- Hutcheson, Francis [1738] 1967 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. In The Scottish Moralists on Human Nature and Society. Louis Schneider, ed. Pp. 39–40. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
- Dell Hymes, ed. 1969 Reinventing Anthropology. New York : Pantheon. Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine 1991 Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetic s and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
- Keesing, Roger M. 1990 Review of The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformation of an Illusion. Man 25: 168.
10.2307/2804146 Google Scholar
- Keesing, Roger M. 1994 Theories of Culture Revisited. In Assessing Cultural Anthropology. Robert Borofsky, ed. Pp. 301–310. New York : McGraw-Hill.
- Klein, Kerwin L. 1992 Frontier Tales: The Narrative Construction of Cultural Borders in Twentieth-Century California. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34: 464–490.
- Knauft, Bruce 1994 Pushing Anthropology Past the Posts: Critical Notes on Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Studies as Influenced by Postmodernism and Existentialism. Critique of Anthropology 14: 117–152.
- Kuklick, Henrika 1991 The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
- Kuper, Adam 1973 Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School, 1922–1972. London : Allan Lane.
- Kuper, Adam 1993 Post-Modemism, Cambridge and the Great Kalahari Debate. Social Anthropology 1: 57–71.
10.1111/j.1469-8676.1992.tb00240.x Google Scholar
- Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Guy M. Rogers 1996 Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press.
- Lewis, Diane 1973 Anthropology and Colonialism. Current Anthropology 14: 581–597.
- Lewis, Herberts. 1963 Jimma Abba Jifar A Despotic Galla Kingdom. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Published as A Galla Monarchy: Jimma Abba Jifar, Ethiopia, 1930–1932. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.
- Linton, Ralph 1936 The Study of Man. New York : Appleton-Century.
- Loizos, Peter 1977 Anthropological Research in British Colonies: Some Personal Accounts. Anthropological Forum 4(2): 137–144.
- Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1948 Essays in the History of Ideas. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons.
- Lowie, Robert H. 1920 Primitive Society. New York : Boni and Liveright. Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins 1993 Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Lyman, Christopher M. 1982 The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis. Washington , DC : Smithsonian Institution Press.
- Malinowski, Bronislaw 1945 The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa. Phyllis Kaberry, ed. New Haven , CT : Yale University Press.
- Malinowski, B., and J. De La Fuente 1982 Malinowski in Mexico: The Economics of a Mexican Market System. Susan Drucker-Brown, ed. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Manners, Robert A. 1965 Remittances and the Units of Analysis in Anthropological Research. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21: 179–195.
- Marcus, George E., and Michael D. Fischer 1986 Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
- McGrane, Bernard 1989 Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other. New York : Columbia University Press.
10.7312/mcgr90482 Google Scholar
- Mead, Margaret 1932 The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe. New York : Columbia University Press.
- Miner, Horace M. 1939 St. Denis: A French-Canadian Parish. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
- De Montaigne, Michel 1948 The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Donald M. Frame, trans. Stanford , CA : Stanford University Press.
- Moore, Sally F. 1994 Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene. Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia.
- Murdock, George P. 1949 Social Structure. New York : Macmillan. New Yorker 1992 Review of Equatoria. December 14: 139.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich [1886] 1973 Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. R. J. Hollingdale, trans. Harmondsworth , UK : Penguin Books.
- Nugent, Stephen 1996 Postmodernism. In Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, eds. Pp. 442–445. London : Routledge.
- Ortiz, Fernando 1947 Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. New York : A. A. Knopf. Parsons, Elsie Clews 1936 Mitla: Town of the Souls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Perry, Richard J. 1992 Why Do Multiculturalists Ignore Anthropologists? The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4: A52–53.
- Perry, William J. 1924 The Growth of Civilization. London : Methuen.
- Powdermaker, Hortense 1939 After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York : Atheneum.
- Powdermaker, Hortense 1966 Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York : W. W. Norton.
- Radin, Paul 1910 A Sketch of the Peyote Cult of the Winnebago: A Study in Borrowing. Journal of Religious Psychology 7: 1–22.
- Radin, Paul [1935] 1975 The Italians of San Francisco: Their Adjustment and Acculturation. New York : Arno.
- Reyna, S.P. 1994 Literary Anthropology and the Case against Science. Man 29: 555–581.
- Rorabaugh, William J. 1989 Berkeley at War The 1960s. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
- Rosaldo, Renato 1994 Whose Cultural Studies? American Anthropologist 96: 525–529.
- Roseberry, William 1995 Latin American Peasant Studies in a “Postcolonial” Era. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1: 150–177.
10.1525/jlca.1995.1.1.150 Google Scholar
- Rosenau, Pauline M. 1992 Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton , NJ : Princeton University Press.
- Said, Edward 1978 Orientalism. New York : Pantheon.
- Schneider, David M. 1995 Schneider on Schneider The Conversion of the Jews and Other Anthropological Stories. David M. Schneider as Told to Richard Handler. Durham , NC : Duke University Press.
10.2307/j.ctv1220qgj Google Scholar
- Smith, G. Elliot (sometimes Elliot Smith, G.) 1911 The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence upon the Civilization of Europe. London : Harper.
- Smith, G. Elliot (sometimes Elliot Smith, G.) 1923 The Ancient Egyptians and the Origin of Civilization. London : Harper.
- Spiro, Melford 1992 A Critique of Cultural Relativism with Special Reference to Epistemological Relativism. In Anthropological Other or Burmese Brother. Pp. 3–51. New Brunswick , NJ : Transaction Press.