The term social anthropology began to be used for a branch of anthropology in the early twentieth century. Initially—when used, for instance, by James George Frazer—it described an evolutionist project. The aim was to reconstruct the original ‘primitive society’ and to chart its development through various stages to civilization. In the 1920s, under the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R.Radcliffe-Brown, the emphasis in British social anthropology (the dominant school) shifted to the comparative study of contemporary societies: Radcliffe-Brown suggested that it was essentially a comparative sociology. ‘Social anthropology’ was now contrasted with ‘cultural anthropology’, as practised in the USA especially, which was concerned with ethnohistory, cultural diffusion, language and, increasingly, with issues of culture and personality.
The British School drew particularly on the sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, who had pioneered the systematic application of sociological theories to ethnographic reports on non-western societies. The borderline between sociology and social anthropology was a permeable one, and when sociology was belatedly established as a university discipline in Britain some of the early chairs went to social anthropologists. Such modern figures as Pierre Bourdieu, Fredrik Barth and Ernest Gellner moved across the boundary between the disciplines in both directions.
As it crystallized, social anthropology became essentially a combination of Durkheimian sociology and ethnographic field research by participant observation. This synthesis came to be known as ‘functionalism’, a vague and contentious label. Malinowski himself stressed personal agency and the conflicts between social norms and individual interest, while the followers of Radcliffe-Brown were more inclined to abstract systems of values and norms. Although there was a great deal of internal debate, from the mid-1920s until the 1960s the small but productive band of British social anthropologists appeared to informed observers to be engaged in a single, specialized project. The main aim was to analyse the synchronic relationships between institutions within a society, and to classify institutions or whole societies into types.
Fieldwork by participant observation, on the model pioneered by Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands (1915–18), became the characteristic mode of ethnographic research. Ideally a trained social anthropologist spent one to two years in the community being studied, integrating with the local people and working in the vernacular language. This research strategy became a defining feature of functionalist anthropology, but it outlived functionalist theory and was diffused to other disciplines, so-called ‘ethnographies’ becoming a feature of various schools of social research.
The major achievement of functionalist anthropology was a series of authoritative, sociologically informed ethnographic studies of societies in Africa, the Pacific and India. Ethnographic studies were increasingly made in Europe, but generally in rural settings. Comparative studies were also fostered, and typologies flourished, based either upon cross-cultural categories or upon the comparison of societies within a particular region (see e.g. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950).
In post-war France, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) developed a ‘structuralist’ approach, which aimed to make general statements about the mentality of human beings as expressed in social institutions and mythologies, drawing not only on Mauss but also on linguistics. Lévi-Strauss influenced some leading British social anthropologists, notably Edmund Leach, Mary Douglas and Rodney Needham. However, both ‘functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’ came under attack in the 1970s. Marxist critics accused both schools of being ahistorical, and of neglecting macrosociological processes. Varieties of Marxist theory and dependency theory became influential. Feminist critics introduced fresh perspectives.
In the 1980s, however, a more fundamental shift became apparent, from the dominantly sociological orientation that had characterized social anthropology for most of the century to a fresh concern with problems of meaning and with ‘culture’, which had been treated as a residual category by the comparative sociologists. American theorists in the tradition of cultural anthropology—notably Clifford Geertz and David Schneider—were increasingly influential in Europe. Later, the post-modernist turn taken by some younger American scholars made converts. This theoretical upheaval was accompanied by a loss of confidence in the objectivity and reliability of established ethnographic field methods. The typological projects of the functionalists and structuralists were often rejected for their positivism and for the perhaps arrogant transposition of western cultural categories to other ways of life.
At the same time, however, the Anglo-French tradition of social anthropology had diffused through much of Western Europe. In 1989 the European Association of Social Anthropologists was established. Judging from the conferences and publications of this flourishing association (see the journal Social Anthropology, which began publishing in 1992), a new synthesis is being established. Modern social anthropologists draw upon a variety of contemporary social theories (see Kuper 1992), and they experiment with a wide range of comparative, historical and ethnographic research strategies. The tradition of ethnographic field research remains strong (with Europe now a major focus of research). Field studies are now often long term and historically informed. The density of ethnographic research in many regions and the presence of local communities of scholars have also made field studies more specialized and, often, more sophisticated.
Despite the theoretical turmoil, social anthropology is more popular than ever before, and perhaps more influential, particularly in the fields of history, sociology, geography and cultural studies. Social anthropologists are also more open than ever to ideas from these and other disciplines (including, most notably, psychology and linguistics), and to interdisciplinary collaboration. They contribute to applied research studies on such questions as ethnic relations, immigration, the effects of medical and educational provision, and even marketing; they are involved in community development projects all over the world.
The fundamental object of modern social anthropology is to confront the models current in the social sciences with the experiences and models of peoples all over the world. While no theoretical perspective dominates the field, contemporary social anthropologists produce sociologically informed, culturally sophisticated, studies of a great variety of social processes; their training provides them with an invaluable comparative perspective on the range of human social behaviour.
Adam Kuper
Brunel University
References
Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (eds) (1940) African Political Systems, London.
Kuper, A. (ed.) (1992) Conceptualizing Society, London.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) Structural Anthropology, London.
Radclifle-Brown, A.R. and Forde, D. (eds) (1950) African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, London.
Further reading
Carrithers, M. (1993) Why Humans have Cultures, Oxford.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1951) Social Anthropology, London.
Hastrup, K. (ed.) (1992) Other Histories, London.
Kuper, A. (1983) Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, London.
Stocking, G. (ed.) (1984) Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology, Madison, WI.
