ESSAY HERBERT S. LEWIS Department of Anthropology University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI 53706 The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences 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, [history of anthropology, anthropological theory, critique of anthropology] O ver the past 30 years cultural anthropology has undergone a far-reaching series of changes that have transformed the field drastically. In the view of many members of an older generation, educated before the 1960s, these changes have left the discipline in a state of severe crisis, its future seriously in doubt. Anthropology is not the only field in this situation: the study of literature and some forms of history have been going through similar changes. But it is different with anthropology because the majority of anthropologists over the past 90 years have looked upon our field as a social science rather than one of the humanities. Insofar as it is a science, anthropologists generally believed that their methods and cumulative knowledge could build progressively, in acollective quest for more reliable understandings of the phenomena we study (cf. Wolf 1994: 227). When Franz Boas and Robert Lowie criticized the evolutionary paradigm, they did it in the name and interest of improved science, as did Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski when they, too, sought to replace evolutionism and diffusionism with their versions of functionalism. When Leslie White in his turn attacked Boas and Lowie, it was to advance his "science of culture." Opponents of the personality and culture school or of structural-functional ism were critical of these approaches because they believed them to be inadequate to the problems they sought to solve. This is generally not true of the most influential critics of the field today—who are more likely to condemn the very notion that anthropology can or should claim to be scientific, if, indeed, they do not condemn science itself (and positivism) as part of the so-called "Enlightenment Project" (Nugent 1996:442; Rosenau 1992: 26, 76, 86). (For recent [critical] reviews of this position see D'Andrade 1995; Darnton 1997: Reyna 1994; Spiro 1996; Weinberg 1996.) The Origins of the Post-1960s Critique of Anthropology The roots of today's attack on the discipline are exogenous in a way that the earlier ones were not, even though there may have been external dimensions to those debates as well. The origins of much of the current rebellion lie in the events of the late 1960s and the reaction of many Americans, young and older, to the Vietnam War and the international student movement of that period, including Berkeley, 1965 (Rorabaugh 1989), and Paris, May 1968 (Brown 1974).' These movements were originally associated with wide-ranging political and intellectual criticisms of U.S. and Western colonialism and capitalism, with Marxist thought playing a crucial role (e.g., Asad 1973; Hymes 1969), but they were soon extended more American Anthropologist 100(3 ):716-731. Copyright© 1999, American Anthropological Association LEWIS broadly to an attack on "the West," the Enlightenment, science, humanism, modernism, culture, and lots more. Whereas many American and British anthropologists who grew up during the Great Depression were inclined toward socialism and Marxism, they still believed in anthropology as a science. But now even the truths of Marxism are in doubt. The hoped-for revolution has not come about, and the many governments that claimed inspiration and guidance from Marx and his heirs were dismal failures. Today, for many of those who counted on the imminent coming of the great transformation, the hold of capitalism and patriarchal hegemony is seen as so great and so corrupting that they no longer hope for anything better. And the whole Enlightenment ideal, humanism, and all that went with it are condemned as nothing but lies—a system of domination through which European and American males control all others. For inspiration, some members of the generation now at the center of influence looked to other sources outside anthropology, to such philosophers as Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, to Gramsci, and to more recent French writers: Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan.2 A common theme of the new anthropology, derived from these writers, is an obsession with power and domination, which must be unmasked in all human discourse and intercourse. Many seem to agree with Nietzsche that "life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation..." ([ 1886] 1973:175; emphasis in original). The apparent positives—such as love, altruism, justice, equality, consideration for others, order, harmony, peace, sanity, health, community, knowledge, science—are but the tricky words used to befuddle and benumb the critical faculties of the dominated in order for the dominant to achieve and maintain control. They are elements in Nietzsche's "slave morality" and "herd morality" ([1886] 1973:178). Here, for example, is a prominent anthropological example of this approach from Johannes Fabian's widely cited Time and the Other (1983:1). Speaking of "Anthropology's claim to power" (which, he says, is part of its "essence" and "not a matter of accidental misuse") and of its "alliance with the forces of oppression," Fabian says, "Nowhere is [it] more clearly visible... than in the uses of Time anthropology makes when it strives to constitute its own object—the savage, the primitive, the Other. It is by diagnosing anthropology's temporal discourse that one rediscovers the obvious, namely that there is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, a historical, apolitical act." The postmodernist condemnation of the "Enlightenment project" has been harnessed to the dissatisfactions, the pain, the struggles, of the oppressed and powerless. Anthropology, dealing as it does with the most intimate, as THE MISREPRESENTATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY 717 well as the most public, of behaviors—of all people in all parts of the world—therefore lives very close to the front lines. By our very involvement with all peoples we are engaged with those folks that our critics call "the Other." We are therefore vulnerable to criticism and attack on many grounds. As a result, an atmosphere of intolerance and generalized condemnation of anthropology and anthropologists has become more than fashionable: indeed, it is virtually obligatory, both among anthropologists themselves as well as among a widening group of critics outside the field. For example, the general complicity of anthropology and anthropologists with "the project of colonialism" seems now to be accepted as a fact rather man as a question requiring investigation and demonstration. On the other hand, the political and intellectual roots of this critique itself, very much the product of the Cold War, are left uninterrogated/ But this mood shall pass, because all intellectual moods and fashions do. The problem is, where will anthropologists turn when the current fashions have been set aside? In such cases it is common practice to take another look at earlier ideas, but anthropologists who might want to do this will face unusual difficulties. A terrible gap has opened up—an awesome chasm, in fact—separating this generation of students and younger anthropologists from the knowledge, data, theories, and understandings developed in the field up to about 1965. The current generation has been told many things about the anthropology of the past, things that cast doubt upon the writings produced by the practitioners of all older anthropology. These anthropologists were not only wrong; they were probably sinful as well. (Thus George Marcus speaks of "the positivist sins of the past" [the back cover, Taussig 1987].) It would seem that the only reason to read them is to produce devastating deconstructions and critical readings. That there may be ideas that could be of use today, or bodies of data that can be appreciated and built upon, seems out of the question. This is very troubling because the intellectual problems that are at the heart of our field have not been solved by the hermeneuticists, the postmodernists, the poststructuralists. the postcolonialists. To quote Santayana's warning once more, with dismaying pertinence: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The basic questions that our predecessors struggled with 100 years ago are still with us. but the hard-won lessons they taught us are being forgotten. (Roseberry makes a similar point [1995:155, 173174].) This is a potentially serious problem, and it is time for us to begin taking a new look at the realities of anthropology's past before it is too late, before too much is forgotten. 718 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 100, No. 3 • The Aims and Procedure of This Paper It is not my intention to criticize the creative work of post-1970s anthropologists, many of whom have produced valuable studies and introduced useful critical perspective into the debates over how to study and represent the peoples and cultures of the world. What I will do, however, is criticize the negative and extremely careless way in which the older anthropology has been represented in leading works and by leading figures of the new anthropology. I shall attempt to demonstrate the extent to which these inaccurate representations have become the conventional wisdom and have thus affected the education of graduate students and the future of our field. I will argue that the time has come to begin a reconsideration of the current conventional wisdom regarding the history and nature of anthropology, a view that has become hegemonic in today's discourse. In effect I will be calling for us to begin the "spiral" process that George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986:10) speak of: "Rather than mere repetition [in intellectual history], there is a cumulative growth in knowledge, through the creative rediscovery of older and persistent questions in response to keenly experienced moments of dissatisfaction with the state of a discipline's practice tied to perceptions of unprecedented changes in the world." I believe it is both necessary and timely to attempt such a creative rediscovery, in this case a rediscovery of our ancestors and of their approaches to these old and persistent problems. In this attempt to open up a reconsideration, I intend to present and discuss three widely accepted criticisms of pre-1970s anthropology that have become part of the standard representation of our past. These claims, I shall argue, are highly questionable and relatively easily falsified by a look at the actual history of the field. If it should be objected that the counterexamples I give were not typical, although I believe that to a considerable extent they were, I would respond that no one approach was ever typical—that pluralism was always the rule. One problem with the current critique of anthropology is the failure to recognize the normal, everyday extent of the variety within the field. There is a common tendency to funnel all of our past through a quick reference to (but only a reference, not an examination of) the work of several famous anthropologists—Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, Benedict, Levi-Strauss, and Geertz—and to pretend that these selected famous individuals represent the field. But the failure to consider both the range of variation and the ideas and works of a broad sample of professional anthropologists results in a serious distortion of our intellectual history. (In fact, most of the work of American anthropologists is ignored and its history is elided with the tacit assumption that the representation of British anthropology can stand for American anthropology as well.) To a great extent the critics have done unto anthropology what SEPTEMBER 1998 they claim anthropology does unto Others: essentialize, totalize, stereotype, "otherize."5 Three Representative Claims about Anthropology The three claims I discuss can be found in concise and explicit form in a recent article by Roger M. Keesing (1994), published in a volume with contributions from many distinguished anthropologists (Borofsky 1993). Roger Keesing was a major contributor to anthropology over the past few decades and his writing could often serve as a weathervane. In this case he stated the new conventional wisdom very clearly. 1. According to Keesing's critique: anthropology treats the peoples it studies as "radically alter," not to be understood in the same ways that we understand ourselves. "If radical alterity did not exist, it would be anthropology's project to invent it." Radical alterity, he writes, "a culturally constructed Other radically different from Us—fills a need in European social thought.... I believe we continue to overstate Difference, in search for the exotic and for the radical Otherness Western philosophy, and Western cravings for alternatives, demand" (p. 301, emphasis added). Since Edward Said's book, Orientalism (1978), this sort of critique has been widely accepted as true. Elsewhere Keesing (1990:168) speaks of "anthropology's Orientalist project of representing Otherness." Said's project seems to have succeeded remarkably well. It is not easy to disabuse graduate students of the notion that anthropologists study only the exotic, the Other, even by reading to them lists of Ph.D. dissertations or titles of papers at AAA meetings that focus on peoples and topics very close to home. Here is another example, from Arturo Escobar's summary of Lila Abu-Lughod's position on culture (AbuLughodl991): To the extent that the culture concept has been the primary tool for making the other and for maintaining a hierarchical system of differences, we must direct our creative efforts against this concept, she prescribes, by "writing against culture." We need to look at similarities, not only at differences; by emphasizing connections, we also undermine the idea of 'total' cultures and peoples.... Can we emphasize not boundedness and separateness but connections? [Escobar 1993:381] I shall argue that lines like these do great injustice to the actual history and nature of our field. 2. Keesing contends that anthropology has always been ahistorical. According to Keesing, "The world of timeless, endlessly self-reproducing structures, social and ideational, each representing a unique experiment in cultural possibility, has (we now know) been fashioned in terms of European philosophical quests and assumptions, superimposed on the peoples encountered and subjugated LEWIS along colonial frontiers" (p. 301; cf. Dirks 1992:3-4; Wallerstein 1996). Johannes Fabian's book Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (1983), is the text of choice here, with its claim that anthropologists dominate by denying coevalness, contemporaneity, to the exotic Others whom we study, our "Objects" (no longer our "Subjects"). 3. Roger Keesing claimed that anthropologists treated each culture as an isolated unit, unconnected to any others. "Their cultures are hermetically sealed, beyond the reaches of time and the world system," he says (p. 306). This is so much a part of the current discourse that Andre Gunder Frank (1990), scorning "traditional" anthropology at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the AAA, claimed that Boas's study of the designs on Eskimo needle cases (Boas 1908) was designed to show the "separateness of cultures" (emphasis added). That Frank did not know what Boas's paper is actually about is unimportant; what is disturbing is that he could make such a statement before a hall full of anthropologists and remain unchallenged. Keesing goes on to decry those who "edit out Christianity, trade stores, labor migration, contemporary politics and cash economy . . . " in accounts of his ethnographic area, Melanesia (p. 306). Lest it be thought that these claims about anthropology are idiosyncratic and uncharacteristic,Terence Turner has enunciated a similar set of charges. Turner writes of (a) "the chronic anthropological tendency... to focus on cultures as discrete units in isolation"; and (b) "the tendencies .. .to treat culture as an autonomous domain,e.g.,as 'systems of symbols and meanings' essentially unconditioned by material, social, and political processes, and the concomitant abstraction of cultural change from political or social relations, particularly relations of inequality, domination, and exploitation" (Turner 1993:415). Elsewhere (1991:292) he speaks of anthropology as having "defined itself in abstraction from the 'situation of contact,' as the antithesis of'change' and the enemy of'history.' " These sorts of claims are by now so widespread, so taken for granted, such a natural part of the intellectual landscape, that they appear as basic truths. We find them repeated in book reviews in The New York Times and The New Yorker as well as in the writings of students and established anthropologists.6 And yet they are so farfromthe actual history and nature of ourfieldthat it shouldraise serious questions about the sociology of knowledge and the development and spread of ideas. I shall consider each of Keesing's critiques in tum. 1. Anthropology Treats the Peoples It Studies as "Radically Alter" What Keesing has done here is to attribute to anthropology in general what is actually the perspective of an influ- / THE MISREPRESENTATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY 719 ential group of post-1970s critics of "traditional" anthropology. An insistence upon the incommensurability of cultures may be basic to Geertz, Clifford, Rabinow. Rosaldo, Tyler, and other recent writers, themselves critics of the Enlightenment view. It is quite uncharacteristic of the major trends in anthropological research and w. riting throughout die past century. We could dismiss Keesing's remark as an eccentricity if it weren't so widely believed and repeated today. In fact, the origins of Western social science are in the Enlightenment, and uniformitarianism was one of the foremost guiding principles of Enlightenment thought— as anti-Enlightenment critics of anthropology realize (cf. Geertz 1973:34-35). Indeed Arthur O. Lovejoy, once the leading historian of ideas in America, wrote: 1. Uniformitarianism.—This is the first and fundamental principle of this general and pervasive philosophy of the Enlightenment. The reason, it is assumed to be evident, is identical in all men; and the life of reason therefore, it is tacitly or explicitly inferred, must admit of no diversity.... Anything of which the intelligibility, verifiability, or actual affirmation is limited to men of a special age, race, temperament, tradition, or condition is eo ipso without truth value, or at all events without importance to a reasonable man. [ 1948:79-80] The idea that the different peoples of the world were radically different from each other was quite contrary to the thought of such writers as Voltaire, Kant, Hume, and Francis Hutcheson. Said Voltaire ([1738] 1963:260261), "Man in general has always been what he is now. This does not mean that he has always had fine cities, twenty-four-pounder cannons, comic operas and convents full of nuns. But he has always had the same instinct which leads him to find satisfaction in himself, in the companion of his pleasures, in his children, in his grandchildren and in the work of his hands." And David Hume wrote, It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men in all nations and ages and that human nature remains still the same in its principles and options. The same motives always produce the same actions: the same events follow from the same causes. Ambition, avarice, selflove, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit: these passions mixed in various degrees, and distributed through society, have been from the beginning of the world and still are the source of all the actions and enterprises which have ever been observed among mankind Mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. [(1777) 1965:104-105) (Hutcheson heaps scom on those who try to shock with accounts of the strangeness of others while ignoring all that is so much the same ([ 1738] 1967:39-40.) Where, in these characteristic Enlightenment statements, do we see the presumed need for radical alterity in this central Western intellectual tradition to which we are, for better or worse, the heirs? Now, one need not go as far 720 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 100, No. 3 • as Clifford Geertz has in questioning Enlightenment uniformitarianism and "anti-relativism" (1973, 1984) in order to doubt, or be disturbed or amused by, the uniformitarian claims of these eighteenth-century writers. But how can today's anthropologists ignore the pervasiveness of the ideaof the sameness ofhumanity as one of the most important intellectual traditions of "the West"? Even J. G. v. Herder, the leading opponent of Enlightenment uniformitarianism, was no believer in radical alterity, but only in the importance of culture and historical traditions. His Hebrews, Greeks, Africans, Laplanders, and so on had the same sorts of motivations and emotions as all the rest of humanity, but he believed in the need to understand the distinctive ways in which their social and natural environments had formed their particular associations, understandings, and reactions. Beyond the differences that he wrote so much about, he believed fervently in a common humanity (Humanita't), and he struggled to combine and balance this with his view of cultural difference. Barnard writes (1965:98), "Nevertheless the view can be upheld—and this is what Herder undoubtedly had at heart—that 'relativism' does not necessarily preclude the sharing of certain common attitudes or 'propensities,' sufficient for some degree of understanding between different peoples and generations, regarding the standards to which they ought to aspire as human beings" (cf. the Boas quotation, note 8). Lewis Henry Morgan was a descendant of the Scottish Enlightenment uniformitarians, and E. B. Tylor believed that "the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes" (1871,1:1). Tylor's approach to the science of culture was influenced by die scientistic uniformitarianism of Auguste Comte's positivism. Positivism is, of course, now considered to be one more of those intellectual structures of domination, but at least it might be absolved from the sin of imposing radical alterity.7 Franz Boas led American anthropology away from Enlightenment and Victorian evolutionism—but not toward radical alterity. In The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), he argued that all human minds work very similarly, differing only in the historically derived cultural materials with which they have to work. The same sorts of irrationalities, fears, loyalties, and bondage to received ideas that one might find in the primitive mind were to be found, for example, in the minds of American undergraduates—and even in his own mind now and then. In fact he was quite critical of "the judgment of the intellectuals, which is much more certain to be warped by unconscious control of traditional ideas" ([1918] 1945:139). He felt strongly that cross-cultural translation and understanding was possible, indeed necessary.8 Boas believed that anthropologists and psychologists should study others (small o), and not only Westerners, SEPTEMBER 1998 precisely because he believed that our minds work similarly. But, as he wrote in a review of a book by Adolph Bastian on cross-cultural psychology, our reasoning is not an absolutely logical one but.. .it is influenced by the reasoning of our predecessors and by our historical environment: therefore our conclusions and theories, particularly when referring to our own mind, which itself is affected by the same influences to which our reasoning is subject, cannot be but fallacious. In order to give such conclusions a sound basis it is absolutely necessary to study the human mind in its various historical, and speaking more generally, ethnic environments. By applying this method, the object to be studied is freed from the influences that govern the mind of the student. [ 1887:284, emphasis added] In other words, The Other R Us, and for that reason, in studying others we are not studying some exotic life forms but ourselves in different settings. If we fail to consider peoples and traditions other than our own we distort our understanding of what it means to be human. It is precisely to guard against the very natural human assumption that what "we" do, based on "our" culture and history, is the natural, the only, the universal way, that we try to include as much of the range of human behavior in our accounts and theories as possible. It is odd that this simple idea is no longer widely understood, having been replaced by the notion that we study "Others" in order to feel superior to them and dominate them. It is remarkable that the lifelong vocation of Boas, Benedict, Herskovits, Mead, and so many others, to combat racism and ethnocentrism, once recognized as a central element in American anthropology's legacy, is now either ignored or made to seem ignoble. My own introduction to anthropology in 1953 was in a course by Robert A. Manners. Bob Manners and his cohort (including Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Morton Fried, Elman Service, and Marvin Harris) were students of Julian Steward and were part of that post-Boasian generation that wanted to return to a particular form of Enlightenment social science concerned with parallel sociocultural developments, with cause and effect relations, and with the search for laws in culture. Forty-five years ago, when I studied with Bob Manners, I sensed considerable resistance, discomfort, perhaps even hostility to the idea that there are (or can be, or should be) deep-seated and longlasting cultural differences between peoples. His was an attitude as different from an insistence on radical alterity as one can imagine. But it will not do to claim that this small band was exceptional, that they were the only ones who found Melville Herskovits's or Ruth Benedict's versions of cultural relativism questionable. They were important exemplars and propagators of a well-established and strongly represented point of view in the anthropology of the 1950s. In many ways it was a dominant view at that time, but, to repeat, anthropology has always been pluralistic. LEWIS Another commonplace of the current discourse is that anthropologists never studied at home, but only in exotic places doing research on "tribal" or "primitive" Others. The fact is that American anthropologists have been working in North American and Western European settings since the late 1920s, slowly at first but at an ever-increasing pace. W. Lloyd Warner, who had studied with Lowie and Kroeber at Berkeley and done research in Australia under the direction of Radcliffe-Brown, was the preeminent figure in this development, but not the only one. Warner's ambitious research projects involved many graduate student collaborators who went on to get their degrees at Harvard and Chicago and to write significant works. It began with the Yankee City research (19291950) centered on Newburyport, Massachusetts (Warner and Lunt 1941), and continued with the Western Electric project (with Elton Mayo and others, 1931-33). the Harvard Irish survey (1931-33), Deep South (1933-36), Black Metropolis (1938-43), Jonesville (1941^49), Rockford, Illinois (1946-1948), Big Business Leaders in America (1953-54), and the American Federal Executive (1958-62). From these came some of the works of James Abegglen, Conrad Arensberg, Horace Cayton, Eliot Chappie, W. Allison Davis, John Dollard, St. Clair Drake, Burleigh Gardner, S. T. Kimball, Leo Srole, W. F. Whyte, and many others (Warner 1988). By 1942 Walter Goldschmidt had received his doctorate at Berkeley for a study of a California rural community (As You Sow), Charlotte Gower got hers at Chicago (1928) for a study of life in Sicily (Chapman 1971), as did Horace Miner (1937) for St. Denis: A French-Canadian Parish (1939), and James Slotkin (1940) for a study of Jewish intermarriage in Chicago. Other anthropologists had done studies of rural agriculture in the United States under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture during the New. Deal, and Hortense Powdermaker had published the results of her research in Mississippi, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939) (see her account of the background to this in Powdermaker 1966). And Paul Radin carried out a study of Italians in San Francisco (Radin 1975). The problem of cross-cultural similarities—as well as differences—has been at the core of the cultural anthropological enterprise all along. It was central to the notion of cultural evolution and to the concern with diffusion. Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown assumed the essential sameness of human beings as the basis of their theories of culture and society. Wissler, Murdock, Linton, and many others wrote about "cultural universals," and the logic of Murdock's exhaustive and ingenious book Social Structure (1949) requires universal commonality. We have been searching for similarities all along. Just look at the organization and emphasis of our general textbooks. It was not until Clifford Geertz's writings became popular in the 1970s that this pursuit came to seem trivial / THE MISREPRESENTATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY 721 and wrongheaded,"as arrogant, misguided, or futile, if not all three" (Spiro 1992:ix). There is now such confusion over the history and nature of our discipline that anthropology as a whole is attacked indiscriminately and inconsistently for both exotizising Others and for universalizing them. And now the work of the critics of classical anthropology is criticized as though it represented classical anthropology itself. (This sort of confusion fills Keesing's article.) The attacks on anthropology from within the field, from literary criticism, and from cultural studies have created an atmosphere in which one must feel embarrassed about being interested in what our sisters and brothers from other times and places have created and diought. Clamoring on the one hand for multiculturalism and the entry of Others and the voiceless into "the canon," the critics chastise those who have been engaged in researching, teaching, and writing about the people of the world's many cultures all along (see, e.g.. Rosaldo 1994; Turner 1993; cf. Perry 1992). Practitioners of this project, anthropologists as well as those in cultural studies, subject to their critical gaze: museums, world fairs and exhibitions, artists and art collectors, writers of general fiction and of travel narratives, photographers, cinematographers, publications (e.g.. The National Geographic), colonial officials, publicists and journalists, even an amateur ornithologist (Hulme 1995). Thus anthropology is condemned through a stipulated, assumed, or insinuated association with anyone who has an interest in "Others" (see, e.g.. Bush 1995; Edwards 1992. Faris 1996; Gordon 1997; Haraway 1989; Karp andLavine 1991; Klein 1992: Kuklick 1991; Lutz and Collins 1993; Lyman 1982; McGrane 1989; Steiner 1995; Thomas 1994; Torgovnick 1990). They seek to deconstruct, to find unworthy motives and unconscious damage, to unmask the evil beneath the appearance of a lively and sympathetic interest. Remarkably they usually seem to find it One must now be embarrassed to take an interest in, let alone devote one's life to the study of, some group of people who are not immediately evident as one's own. The extraordinary idea has been put about that choosing an object to study that is far from home is a way of distancing and alienating oneself from that object (Wacquant 1993; cf. McGrane 1989:114ff.). To spend years of one's life trying to learn the language of another group; to live with them; to listen to them; to learn about their feelings, values, problems, the bases of their social relations, their economic struggles and political travails; to seek to understand their rituals and beliefs: all this is really a way of distancing yourself from them? What an ingenious paradox (cf. Moore 1994:125)! If true, it would indeed be a grievous sin, but is it true? In the 1580s Michel de Montaigne wrote, "I see most of the wits of my time using their ingenuity to obscure the 722 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 100, No. 3 glory of the beautiful and noble actions of antiquity, giving them some vile interpretation and conjuring up vain occasions and causes for them. What great subtlety! Give me the most excellent and purest action and I will plausibly supply fifty vicious motives for it. God knows what a variety of interpretations may be placed on our inward will, for anyone who wants to elaborate them" (1948: 170).9 The myth of the anthropologist and the Other, the anthropologist and radical alterity, may be a useful weapon in the war upon the past, in the struggle to establish one's own credentials. It should not be confused with a reasonable characterization of the field. To quote George Appell, "historical truth appears to be the first casualty of the battle over the soul of anthropology" (1992:196; cf. Moore 1994:124-125). 2. Anthropology Has Always Been Ahistorical Here the critics have seized upon a brief moment in the history of anthropology, an important but limited episode in British anthropology, and have projected this moment onto the whole of the field in both Britain and America. They have succeeded so well that it seems mandatory for graduate student proposals, papers, and dissertations (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at least) to begin with words to the effect that "anthropology always ignored history, but now we know better and / will really introduce history in my work." A disturbing number of their elders have accepted this idea as well. It is true that, for particular theoretical reasons, Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski argued that it was unnecessary, and probably impossible, to reconstruct histories in order to do scientific analyses of societies and cultures without written records. But as influential as they were in England for a while, this view never won acceptance in America. In the United States, from the time Franz Boas began teaching in the 1890s, history became of paramount concern for the large majority of working anthropologists. Insofar as the Boas "school" has a name it is the American Historical School. Boas, Kroeber, Wissler, E. C. Parsons, Bunzel, Dixon, Lowie, Goldenweiser, Sapir, Spier, Herskovits, Linton, Murdock, Lesser, and many others argued about history, urged its study, worked out methods for recapturing the unwritten past, and complained about the absence of historicity in the schemes of the evolutionists and diffusionists whom they criticized. They regularly and normally incorporated history into much of what they did, and they worked in departments together with archaeologists whose major concern was history. In one of his many farsighted papers, Boas argued for the importance of the study of history and historical processes for future progress in anthropology. In 1920 he wrote, SEPTEMBER 1998 In order to understand history it is necessary to know not only how things are, but how they have come to b e . . . . It is true that we can never hope to obtain incontrovertible data relating to the chronological sequence of events, but certain broad outlines can be ascertained with a high degree of probability, even of certainty. As soon as these methods are applied, primitive society loses the appearance of absolute stability which is conveyed to the student who sees a certain people only at a certain given time. All cultural forms rather appear in a constant state of flux and subject to fundamental modifications. [1920:314— 315, emphasis added] Melville J. Herskovits, throughout his career, railed at "the ahistorical approach to the Negro past," arguing against the myth that the Negro hadno history. And, more generally, he would get furious at those who failed to recognize that all peoples had been on earth equally long. "We cannot too often emphasize the fact—we might say the axiom—that no living culture is static," he wrote (1948:479); all had complex histories. For this reason he would not accept the idea that a living hunting and gathering people could be used to represent the conditions of an earlier evolutionary stage. Ironically, a small but vocal band of critics of anthropology has recently come forward arguing that the Bushmen of southwest Africa have had a long and complex history that anthropologists ignored as they constructed the Bushmen according to their own images and politics (see Barnard 1992, Kuper 1993 for reviews of the Great Kalahari Debate). Is this Mel Herskovits' s revenge? Faced with the evidence of the historical concerns of Boas, Kroeber, and their ilk, some critics respond, in effect: "But that was before Benedict and Mead and the British functionalists who wiped out all history."10 But that is not true either. Anyone who studied anthropology in the United States in the 1950s knows that history was a natural and normal part of the field in those days. Julian Steward's multilineal evolution was, of course, informed by and concerned with history as well as with evolution. Steward hoped to derive cross-cultural and evolutionary generalizations from the study of culture-historical particulars. At Columbia, where I went to graduate school, the courses and discourses of people like Morton Fried, Conrad Arensberg, Joseph Greenberg, Charles Wagley, and Harold Conklin were saturated with history. My own dissertation research (begun in 1958) involved a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and historical reconstruction, using both written materials and oral testimony. No one ever told me it was at all unusual and I had no problem getting funding for fieldwork from the Ford Foundation or getting it published in 1965. To repeat, only through ignorance—willful or not— can it be maintained that American anthropology was ever generally ahistorical, while the famous ahistoricity of British anthropology was confined to a relatively short LEWIS period, and by no means involved or included all of its practitioners. Even such prominent British Africanists as Isaac Shapera, Evans-Pritchard, M G. Smith, John Barnes, S. F. Nadel, and Ian Cunnison published historical studies. It is particularly ironic that the critics who claim that anthropology is ahistorical should themselves treat the history of anthropology so cavalierly, so amateurishly, and so out-of-keeping with the historicist spirit (see Stocking [1968] for a concise discussion of this problem). Fabian's gross characterization of thefieldin Time and the Other is a prime example. It is even more striking, given the supposed new emphasis on history, that sweeping statements like these go unexamined and unchallenged. Here is another example of such a claim. Marcus and Fischer write that after World War n, when "America emerged as the dominant economic force Parsonian sociology became a hegemonic framework, not merely for sociology, but for anthropology, psychology, political science, and models of economic development as well" (1986:10). This is an astonishing claim, and it would be very interesting to see them attempt to demonstrate it with evidence derived from such sources as anthropological works produced from a Parsonian perspective, anthropologists' citations of Parsons, or course offerings in a Parsonian mode. Such an investigation would show that Parsonian sociology was never mat influential in anthropology, let alone hegemonic, unless "hegemonic" means "somewhat popular at Harvard and Chicago." Parsons had some influence for a time among students at the Harvard Department of Social Relations, notably on David Schneider and Clifford Geertz, and perhaps, as the result of the migration of these two, at Chicago (Schneider 1995:82-83). It was certainly not the reigning paradigm in the anthropology departments at Arizona, Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, North Carolina, Northwestern, Pennsylvania, Stanford, UCLA, or Yale, to name the major graduate schools of that period. Even a cursory examination of the programs of the annual meetings of the AAA in the 1950s, OT of the American Anthropologist and the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, the major American journals of that time, or of the AAA Guide to Departments of Anthropology, first issued in 1962-63, will show how unlikely this assertion is." Such statements call for examination, not casual acceptance. The representation of anthropology s history and nature has become a major element in much of the recent theoretical literature, and it is time to subject these constructions to the same critical scrutiny that we should give to any other truth claims. 3. Anthropologists Treated Each Culture as an Isolated Unit, Unconnected to Any Others This charge is equally unfounded. Certainly we can find many examples of particular works that focus on individ- / THE MISREPRESENTATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY "*23 ual communities or peoples that do not consider any other groups or outside forces. Sometimes this failure is egregious, sometimes perfectly reasonable and understandable, given the aims and perspective of a particular study. But it is simply incorrect to claim that anthropology or anthropologists as a whole or in general treated each culture as an isolated unit. In 1920, in Primitive Society, Robert H. Lowie stated his disagreement with "Windelband and his school," to whom each manifestation of human history represents a unique phenomenon, an absolutely indefinable set of values that can merely be experienced through the visionary s intuition and then transmitted in fainter tints to his public. Ethnographic effort conducted in this spirit would result in a gallery of cultural portraits each complete in itself and not related with the rest . . . whatever else the investigator of a civilization may do, he must be an historian. . . . The great strength of the diffusionist theory lies in the abundance of evidence that transmission has played an enormous part in the growth of cultures, [pp. 3,4.8] Franz Boas was studying diffusion in the 1890s. Among omer things, he pointed to the existence of myths and stories found throughout the Northwest Coast, distributed widely but unevenly among the many peoples there and throughout North America, and even beyond, in northeastern Asia. He recognized that these tales owed their distribution to both common inheritance and to transmission from one group to anotfier, to diffusion. The great Jesup North Pacific Expedition that he organized in the 1890s (Boas 1902) was concerned with precisely these sorts of cultural connections, particularly the intercontinental ones. Boas further noted that as people borrowed from one another they absorbed the new elements in distinctive ways, transforming the borrowed material, naturalizing it, making it their own in the process. "[T]he phenomena of acculturation prove that a transfer of customs from one region into another without concomitant changes due to acculturation, are very rare." He was deeply concerned about the processes, the "psychology," he called it, of transmission, reinterpretation, and reintegration (1920: 318). As early as 1910 Paul Radin published a paper on the processes by which Winnebago developed a peyote cult, through borrowing, elaboration, and reinterpretation. Radin was fully cognizant of the influence of other peoples (how could he fail to be?) and of the agency of individuals. This approach was common in Boasian anthropology, as even a glance at the writings of Elsie Clews Parsons, forexample, will show. The idea of the "culture area," with all its acknowledged weaknesses, was premised on the understanding that neighboring peoples influenced each other. Beyond the individual cultures, it was understood that you could 724 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 100, No. 3 • not draw boundaries between areas because there were none. We grew up as anthropologists reciting Ralph Linton's short tour de force "100 per cent American" (1936:326327) that demonstrated vividly the truth that Boas had showed us, that every culture was composed of elements from all over, that every people's culture is a composite of ideas, practices, techniques from many sources, as well as those they hit upon through their own imagination and the contingencies of life. This was just part of our basic understanding of the world in those days. The study of acculturation became central to American anthropology by the 1920s. Criticizing Frank Cushing (who wrote in the 1880s) for his contention that Zuni culture could be explained "entirely on the basis of the reaction of the Zuni mind to its geographical environment," Boas wrote that "Dr. [Elsie Clews] Parsons's studies prove conclusively the deep influence which Spanish ideas have had upon Zuni culture, and, together with Professor Kroeber's investigations, give us one of the best examples of acculturation that have come to our notice" (1920:317). Ruth Bunzel went to Chichicastenango in 1930 in order to study bearers of a living culture who had been deeply influenced by "400 years of European domination" (pp. v-vi, her words), and yet had made their own distinctive adjustment to those new elements. She complains that "the studies of 'pure' or reconstructed cultures where we had no historical perspective were too static and gave a misleading impression of cultural stability" (p. v). (Elsie Clews Parsons had similar aims when she started work in Mitla in 1929; Margaret Mead published The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe in 1932.) Studies of change, of acculturation, of the impact of the horse, money, the gun, or the fur trade on American Indians were basic to American anthropology from the 1930s on. Take, for instance, the monographs published by the American Ethnological Society, works by Bernard Mishkin, Esther Goldfrank, John Ewers, Joseph Jablow, Oscar Lewis, Jane Richardson Hanks, Frank Secoy, and John Bennett, or the series of modern Latin American community studies carried out in the 1930s and 1940s and published by the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Smithsonian Institution under the direction of Julian Steward. These included works by Ralph Beals, George Foster, Sol Tax, John Gillin, George Kubler, Harry Tschopik, Donald Pierson, and Donald Brand. Robert Redfield was publishing his works on change in Yucatan during the same period, and Melville Herskovits was well into his research on change and continuity in various "New World Negro" cultures (see Ebihara 1985; Stocking 1976:13^19). As for British anthropology, let's glance at Malinowski's The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945). This rarely cited work contains papers written in the late '30s SEPTEMBER 1998 and this statement, apparently from 1938, is typical of the tone of the volume: When the plane descends in Kisumu we are in a small town largely controlled by the gold-mining interests of the region. Part ofit looks almost European. Some streets remind us of India. But the whole is a compound product with an existence of its own, determined by the proximity of several African tribes, by the activities of the Europeans who live and trade there, and the fact of Indian immigration. It is an important center of gold export and trade; as such, it must be studied by the sociologist in relation to world markets, overseas industrial centers and banking organizations, as well as to African labor and natural resources. [1945:10, emphasis added] This, from one of the great villains of the current version of the history of anthropology, one who supposedly considered each culture as timeless, unique, cut off from all others (cf. the introduction Malinowski wrote for Fernando Ortiz's book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar [1947]).12 At the time of his death Malinowski was working on markets and economic change in Mexico (Malinowski and de la Fuente 1982). The notes that I took on March 15,1955, in Robert Manners's course on applied anthropology, read, "Malinowski says all study of culture now has to be a study of contact and diffusion, because there no longer is an 'uncontaminated' native society." After Malinowski, in addition to his student Raymond Firth, who has been writing about change in Tikopia since the early 1930s, there was the work of his students in Africa: Monica Hunter {Reaction to Conquest, 1936), Hilda Kuper, Audrey Richards, Lucy Mair. Phyllis Kaberry, Isaac Shapera, and Ellen Hellmann (who did a study of an urban "slum" yard in the 1930s [1948]). And then there was the Rhodes-Livingstone group, with Max Gluckman, Elizabeth Colson, A. L. Epstein, William Watson, J. Van Velsen, J. Clyde Mitchell, and many others, all concerned with change and outside influences in Central Africa from the late 1940s (see Epstein's memoir of fieldwork on the Copperbelt in the 1950s in his Scenes from African Urban Life, 1992; cf. Gluckman 1968:234). And there were Americans studying change in Africa as well: Hortense Powdermaker, Lloyd Fallers, and the host of students of Melville Herskovits. (A sample of their work can be seen in the edited volume, Continuity and Change in African Cultures [Bascom and Herskovits 1959].) There was a vast corpus on change in Melanesia by British-trained and American anthropologists, such as Cyril Belshaw, Paula Brown, Glynn Cochrane, A. L. and Scarlett Epstein, Ben Finney, Ian Hogbin, Robert Maher, Phyllis Kaberry, Margaret Mead, Richard Salisbury, and many others. What is that vast body of literature on the so-called cargo cults and other religious responses to colonialism and contact all about if not change and connections to other peoples? Given the abundance of this literature, how could Roger Keesing, or anyone else, make it seem as LEWIS though anthropologists regularly ignored change in that area? It is, of course, quite possible that today's scholar may not like the conclusions that were reached, or even the premises, but surely there is no excuse for pretending that these questions were not addressed. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the works of Julian Steward and his students, including Bob Manners, Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, and Bob Murphy, established the beginnings of "world systems" theory. There is a straight line from the People ofPuerto Rico project (Steward et al. 1956), via Eric Wolfs writings and teaching, to Andre Gunder Frank and to Immanuel Wallerstein's "world system." Bob Manners's courses in the early 1950s were filled with the problem of the impact of capitalism, commodities, and world markets. In 1965 the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology featured Manners's paper, "Remittances and the Units of Analysis in Anthropological Research," in which he spoke of "the social field" as "the entire world" and of "global interrelatedness" and said that "all anthropology" is "world anthropology." As his discussion in that paper shows, he was even then joining an ongoing debate that engaged many other contributors, too. And in the 1950s Steward's monograph Area Research: Theory and Practice, with its emphasis on the study of complex societies and the links among communities, states, markets, and institutions, was must reading for Columbia graduate students. These were not exceptions; they were almost the norm. I apologize for belaboring the obvious for those who know how obvious this is, but it is a scandal that these basic facts are unknown to so many of our younger colleagues, and have perhaps been forgotten by many older anthropologists who should know better. Fortunately they are a matter of record for those who care to look into the literature. Some Implications My complaint about the contemporary anti-anthropology discourse involves more than a concern for fairness. I am concerned about the loss of knowledge from the past. Anthropology consisted of far more than ethnographies, far more than just the works of Mead and Geertz, Benedict and Malinowski, Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown, Boas and Redfield. As afieldit had produced a vast storehouse of knowledge about the peoples of the world, with neither the intent nor the result of conquering and dominating them—a rich literature of concern for both the universals, the things that all humans share, and the differences among us, and how these might be explained. We rightly prided ourselves on our holism and our wide-ranging ability to compare peoples and cultures, without implying inferiority and superiority, in an effort to know what makes us all tick, all of us humans. This heritage has been reduced to a handful of stereotypes and misperceptions, with the result that students and younger profession- / THE MISREPRESENTATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY 725 als have been led to ignore (perhaps even to execrate) this body of ideas, problems, information, debate, and struggle against ignorance and prejudice. Let me offer just two examples: the cases of Black Athena and The Bell Cune. Both have to do with the relationship of race, language, and culture. The massive volumes by Martin Bemal, Black Athena (1987,1991), have gained a gTeat deal of publicity and notoriety. In volume 1 Professor Bemal argues that racism has pervaded European studies of the classics, especially of Egypt and Greece, and as a result scholars have knowingly hidden the truth; that the Greeks learned everything that was novel and valuable in their culture from the Egyptians. And Bemal leads us to believe that the Egyptians were "black." Volume 2 presents what Professor Bemal claims to be the empirical evidence for his thesis about the origins of Greek culture. What troubles me most as an anthropologist is not that Bemal is playing the old game of posing as the crusading amateur fighting against and scorned by the bigoted professors, or that he has simply turned the racist formulations of the nineteenth-century upside down. (Of course these bother me plenty, too.) I am concerned that in 1991 the American Anthropological Association honored Bemal with a full afternoon symposium devoted to his work but did not bring forward a single scholar to challenge his abuse of anthropological, linguistic, and historical scholarship. A number of classicists have heavily criticized his work (e.g.. Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996), but anthropologists have been silent, perhaps through cowardice but more likely because too few remember the lessons that Boas, Sapir, Kroeber, Greenberg, and others taught us. Martin Bemal's second volume violates the primary Boasian principle that "race, language, and culture" must each be analyzed in its own right, that they can vary independently, that evidence of the presence of an element from one realm is no proof of the existence of those from others. The very lessons that made it possible for Joseph Greenberg to remove racism and ethnocentrism from African linguistic classification, and thus set the whole study of African history on a new basis, do not exist for Bemal. The phenomenon of diffusion, and the distinction between it and migration and genetic connection, have no meaning for Bemal. Everything that we have learned about processes of change and cultural transmission is ignored. He barely acknowledges the existence of G. Elliot Smith and W. J. Perry, two of the "extreme diffusionists" whose writings remarkably anticipate his own but whose work brought diffusionism and anthropological historicism into total disrepute in Britain, for good reasons (see Stocking 1995:197-232). Rather than respond to the serious historiographical and anthropological criticisms of Elliot Smith's writings, however, he devotes just over two pages and a footnote to a garbled history hinting that a variety of sinister professional, political, and racist motives 726 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 100, No. 3 • defeated Smith and his school (Bemal 1987:270-272, 486). We have lived through some of the same claims of Egyptian superiority before, but in earlier times it was in the service of Eurocentric racism (see, e.g., Stanton 1960:45-53, as well as Perry 1924andSmith 1911,1923). The scholarship is no better when the same outmoded ideas are used to rum the tables. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect Bernal, a professor of political science specializing in modern China, to be conversant with the important debates that took place in anthropology around these issues. But how is it that a panel of six anthropologists could discuss his work, largely approvingly, and never bring up these issues— ones that were actively under discussion 75 years ago? Despite all the talk about history in the new anthropology, it would seem that students are not being introduced to these old-fashioned historical methods and topics after all. I fear a major and growing loss of knowledge, both of the ethnographic record and of the gains to our understanding of human behavior derived from earlier anthropology. But the problems have not been solved and future generations will inevitably return to them. It is time to look back to the work of our field to see what struggles our predecessors went through and what was learned through their efforts. It is sad to see how little arole social and cultural anthropologists have played in the debate over R. J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. (Happily, some physical anthropologists have become involved.) These two authors resurrected all the old claims about racial inequalities in intelligence that, for so many years, cultural anthropologists were prepared to criticize with assurance, based on the research and writings of Franz Boas, Otto Klineberg, Ashley Montagu, and many others. Now that cultural and physical anthropology have drifted so far apart, and this past has been largely forgotten or denied, how do today's anthropologists respond in class and in writing to issues like this? How many understand the extent to which anthropology was the bulwark against the acceptance of racist and ethnocentric claims by those who wanted scientific reasons not to accept these ever-present dangers to humanity?13 Conclusions The followers of Foucault, Edward Said, and Johannes Fabian have managed to do to anthropology what Said says Westerners have done to the Orient or to the Other: invent something that never existed in order to dominate it. Their version of anthropology—their invented anthropology—has served to "otherize" and marginalize anthropologists and anthropological knowledge. (I might say that it had disempowered anthropology, but since when did it have power [pace Fabian 1983]?) The result of this, unless the process is arrested, will be a serious loss of a SEPTEMBER 1998 large part of an important field of knowledge, to the detriment of those who want to learn about human behavior. Ironically, there is probably much less disagreement about certain basic values and principles between the oldtime practitioners of anthropology and many of their critics than the critics have led us to believe. Both groups would say that they believe in the importance and validity of viewing and treating all peoples equally and with dignity; there is explicit belief in the need to include history; neither group sees cultures as isolated and unique; many want to avoid reifying, homogenizing, and totalizing "culture." (See Brightman 1995 on "the imminent demise of culture.") The problem is that the critics are either ignorant of the common ground we share or are willfully distorting the past for their own advantage. By making it seem that an earlier anthropology regularly violated these principles, the critics have delegitimized the field and discouraged newcomers from benefiting from the many lessons it has to teach about the world. Perhaps there is nothing that can be done. Perhaps we old-time anthropologists will simply have to accept what seems to us as the inevitable decline of the world, or at least of our world. But intellectual perspectives and fashions come and go, and this current fashion will also soon pass. There are already signs of fatigue and a coming reevaluation. And when this happens there will still be a need to deal with the most basic questions of human nature and culture. It is likely that there will be a return to many of the same topics and approaches that marked our discipline in earlier periods, and that the experiences and ideas of earlier generations will still have a vital role to play. Those of us who remember a time when a more or less unified field made the sympathetic study of human behavior, in all its local manifestations, the center of our holistic discipline have an obligation to speak out to correct the distortions of the record. Even more important, however, is to let the next generation know of the value of the great corpus of anthropological work that is available to them when the time comes that they are once again interested in these problems and approaches. Those of us who studied anthropology before 1960 learned respect for other peoples and cultures. We learned of the need to look at history and to consider the connections among peoples, cultures, and institutions. But we were also taught respect for the pragmatic, pluralistic, and communal quest for knowledge, including that form we call "science" (cf. Bernstein 1992:323-340). I believe it is time for a reorientation of the dominant intellectual style of the past three decades in anthropology. It is time to turn away from a view of humanity that sees everything in terms of a Nietzschean will-to-power, to return to our true roots in both humanism and science. We might begin by taking a fresh look into the ideas and substantive accom- LEWIS plishments of our fallible struggling predecessors in the field of anthropology. Notes Acknowledgments. The first version of this paper was a talk given at a day to honor Professor Robert A. Manners at Brandeis University in October 1994.1 am indebted to Bob Manners, who passed away in 1996, for die exciting introduction to anthropology he gave me in the 1950s, and for encouraging me to write this piece in the 1990s. 1 am indebted as well to many friends and colleagues who either heard the original presentation or have read and commented on various written versions. Among these I must single out my longtime friend and colleague, the late Arnold Strickon, who read and commented on this piece as well as much that I have written over the years, and Harold Fleming, Leonard Markovitz, David Henige, and my wife Marcia Lewis. The American Philosophical Society facilitated my research on Franz Boas through the award of a Mellon Resident Research Fellowship. Finally I am grateful to the reviewers (Patty Jo Watson and a second reader who remains anonymous) for their careful reading and excellent editorial suggestions. 1. I am not aware of any published studies of these developments as they affected anthropology. Perhaps it is still too early, but it would certainly be worthwhile to investigate the political and intellectual history of this era as it relates to recent and current anthropology. 2. Thus, in certain critical respects, both the impetus for this latest revolution in anthropology and its intellectual inspiration comes from outside the field of anthropology itself. For a useful piece dealing with some of the many intellectual influences, though not the origins or causes, see Knauft (1994); also see Ferry and Renaut (1990). 3. This blanket condemnation of an essentialized and reified entity called "anthropology" comes right after an apparent misrepresentation of an important passage from E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture. As an epigraph to the first chapter, immediately following a quote from Georg C. Lichtenberg on the efficacy of the use of force, Fabian places Tylor's statement that research into the history and prehistory of man "has its practical side, as a source of power destined to influence the course of modem ideas and actions" (Tylor 1871,11:443). Given the point of Fabian's book, someone not familiar with the passage might suppose that Tylor meant that anthropology could be used to dominate Others, hi fact, he meant that such knowledge could be used as a basis for the reform of British society. 4. The basis of this claim rests largely on a few slenderpieces from the 1960s and 1970s, for example, Asad (1973), Gough (1968), and D. Lewis (1973) (see Forster 1973 for a review; Stocking 1991:3-8). In our era, when critique is the order of the day, why have these rather slight pieces, clearly based on Cold War interests and debates which themselves need rethinking, not only remained unchallenged but been readily accepted as unquestioned historical truth, the gospel mat grounds current understandings? Although a number of older British anthropologists have written to question this view, based on their own experiences, they are ignored (see, e.g., essays by R. Firth, A. I. Richards.P.C. Lloyd,S.Chilver,I.M. Lewis in Loizos 1977;cf. Kuper 1973, Goody 1995:191 -208, esp.). / THE MISREPRESENTATION OF ANTHROPOLOGY 727 Given the fact that American anthropologists began working outside of the United States as a matter of course only after World War II, largely after the colonial era, and few American anthropologists were ever in the camp of the structural-functionalists, by what intellectual sleight of hand and guilt by association does American anthropology become equally tarred with the same brush as the British in Africa or the Pacific? The whole question of the relationship between American Indians and anthropologists needs calmer and more thorough study than it has yet received. Perhaps the recent volume edited by Thomas Biolsi (1997) will begin the process. 5. Marcus and Fischer complain of "'a persistent tendency to drag all discussions back to the classic works of thefirstgeneration of modem fieldworkers. . . . Quibbles that authors of pioneering descriptive accounts of other cultures such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, or Gregory Bateson already'said something like that,' .. .arenothelpful if they do not focus on how we can do better" (1986: viii-ix). I do not intend to quibble that Boas "said something like that" but to argue, sometimes citing Boas and Malinowski, that in important respects the whole history and nature of the field has been seriously misrepresented in ways that forestall and hamper the development of deeper and better understandings of humanity. What they actually taught and wrote does make a difference! 6. For example, a book review with the heading "Anthropologists! Fold Up Your Tents" ends "Ms. Abu-Lughod has demonstrated with great effectiveness that anthropology does not have to emphasize the divisions between us and everybody else; it is equally capable of drawing attention to our common humanity" (Edgar 1993). And, Anthropology • , having heroically defined itself as the study of man, has sunk into a deserved moral crisis" (New Yorker 1992). 7. As George W. Stocking rightly points out (1968:110132), many nineteenth-century evolutionists held attitudes toward "primitives" and other "races" that we (and our earlier twentieth-century predecessors) deplore and condemn. But to a great extent they still made assumptions about the uniformity of human behavior under similar evolutionary and environmental conditions. 8. In fact, Boas believed that there was a universal core of common ethical tendencies. "I might say instinctive ethical tendencies," he wrote to his colleague John Dewey in 1913. As late as 1941 he reaffirmed this: As an anthropologist I feel very strongly that it is possible to state certain fundamental truths which are common to all mankind, notwithstanding the form in which they occur in special societies. These general human characteristics are a protection against a general relativistic attitude. I believe mat the ability to see the general human truth under the social forms in which it occurs is one of the viewpoints that ought to be most strongly emphasized. [Boas correspondence, microfilm. Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, 3/29/13 and 2'17/41] 9. Montaigne also says. "It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books man about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other. The world is swarming with commentaries; of authors there is a great scarcity" (1948:818). 728 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST • VOL. 100, No. 3 • 10. Nicholas Thomas, in an encyclopedia article on history and anthropology, grants five lines of double-column space to "Boasian anthropology" and claims, predictably, "such 'history' [sic] became increasingly marginal in synchronic studies of cultural and symbolic systems... ."(1996:272). 11. The one area in which Parsonian thought had some currency in the late 1950s and early 1960s was in connection with studies of change and development. Even in this sphere it was hardly pervasive, let alone "hegemonic," and was found mostly in the work of those at the edge of sociology. 12. In the most recent edition of this work, Fernando Coronil (1995) shows how Malinowski's enthusiastic support of Ortiz's work can be deconstructed to Malinowski 's disadvantage. 13. It is ironic, but unfortunately not surprising, that there is currently a resurgence of emphasis upon "race" coming from both the political Right and from the camps of the multiculturalists, the champions of identity politics, the postcolonialists, and so on. The Right will never accept the arguments of earlier anthropologists; the otiiers do not seem to know what they are, or at least not to recognize their value (see, e.g., Visweswaran 1998). 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. Asad,Talal,ed. 1973 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press. Barnard, Alan 1992 The Kalahari Debate: A Bibliographical Essay. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 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