Visions of Culture: An Annotated Reader

517 Pages·2009·1.11 MB·English

by  Jerry D. Moore

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Jerry D. Moore is professor and chairperson of anthropology at California State
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University, Dominguez Hills. e
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Edited by
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For orders and information please contact the publisher
Jerry D. Moore
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cial structure (cid:129) Benedict (cid:129) communitas (cid:129) Radcliffe-Brown (cid:129) social structure (cid:129) Benedict (cid:129) communitas (cid:129) Radcliffe-Brow
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Visions of Culture

Visions of Culture
An Annotated Reader
Edited by
Jerry D. Moore
A Division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Visions of culture : an annotated reader / edited by Jerry D. Moore.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1854-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7591-1854-X (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1855-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7591-1855-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
eISBN-13: 978-0-7591-1856-0
eISBN-10: 0-7591-1856-6
1. Culture. 2. Anthropology. 3. Ethnology. I. Moore, Jerry D.
GN357.V57 2009
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Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Introduction vii
Part I: Founders
1 Edward Tylor 3
2 Lewis Henry Morgan 13
3 Franz Boas 25
4 Émile Durkheim 37
Part II: The Nature of Culture
5 Alfred Kroeber 51
6 Ruth Benedict 63
7 Edward Sapir 89
8 Margaret Mead 107
Part III: The Nature of Society
9 Marcel Mauss 125
10 Bronislaw Malinowski 137
11 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown 153
12 Edward E. Evans-Pritchard 169
v
vi Contents
Part IV: Evolutionary, Adaptionist, and Materialist Theories
13 Leslie A. White 187
14 Julian Steward 209
15 Marvin Harris 229
16 Eleanor Burke Leacock 245
Part V: Structures, Symbols, and Meaning
17 Claude Lévi-Strauss 277
18 Victor Turner 299
19 Clifford Geertz 315
20 Mary Douglas 343
Part VI: Structures, Practice, Agency, and Power
21 James W. Fernandez 361
22 Sherry B. Ortner 391
23 Pierre Bourdieu 405
24 Eric R. Wolf 419
25 Marshall D. Sahlins 457
Index 503
Introduction
Visions of Culture: An Annotated Reader is an edited anthology of articles by
twenty-five anthropologists—Edward Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, Franz Boas,
Émile Durkheim, Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret
Mead, Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Leslie
White, Julian Steward, Marvin Harris, Eleanor Burke Leacock, Edward Evans-
Pritchard, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz,
James Fernandez, Sherry Ortner, Pierre Bourdieu, Eric Wolf, and Marshall
Sahlins. This anthology is designed to complement the text, Visions of Culture:
An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists (Moore 2008 [3rd edi-
tion]). For that reason this volume,Visions of Culture: An Annotated Reader,re-
flects the assumptions and concerns that motivated my original book.
First, the original articles are intellectual waypoints in the development of
anthropology in the United States, Great Britain, and France from the mid-
19th to the early 21st century. In each article we encounter a scholar, limited
and enabled by the state of anthropological knowledge in her or his time,
who is attempting to understand cultural differences. Repeatedly we en-
counter an anthropologist engaged in a debate with other anthropologists,
predecessors and contemporaries. Marshall Sahlins, writing in the 1990s,
“debates” with Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960), Julian Steward (1902–1972),
and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) among other anthropologists—not to en-
gage in some sterile intellectual exercise, but because Sahlins understands
that his own anthropological insights are indebted to those of earlier schol-
ars, even in disagreement. E. E. Evans-Pritchard distinguishes his concept of
anthropology from those of his former professor, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown.
Radcliffe-Brown delineates his ideas from those of his contemporary rival
Bronislaw Malinowski, and the American cultural anthropologists—such as
vii
viii Introduction
Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict—whom he held in a disdain
verging on pity. Ruth Benedict distances her ideas from those of a prior gen-
eration (for example, Sir James Frazier) and from other scholars of her own
era. Pierre Bourdieu responds to Claude Lévi-Strauss. Eric Wolf in an address
to the American Anthropological Association delivered in 1990 responds to
Boasian particularism, the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, the
theoretical shortcomings of Julian Steward’s research program in Puerto Rico
(in which Wolf participated), and a broad array of other social theorists from
Sherry Ortner to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
Anthropology students easily become distracted by this theoretical
clamor, taking as cacophony what is actually a conversation stretching over
decades. Central to that conversation are a set of key issues: What is the na-
ture of culture? How can anyone understand or explain the complex and
often-subtle variations of the human experience? To what extent is cultural
behavior adaptive and utilitarian or inherently symbolic and irreducible to
pragmatics? How can we understand people from cultural traditions differ-
ent from our own? Is anthropology a search for scientific laws or an explo-
ration of diverse culturally specific meanings?
Visions of Culture: An Annotated Readerencourages students to eavesdrop
on that conversation—with the idea that someday, some of them will par-
ticipate in it.
While the articles selected here are all texts about anthropological theory,
they are simultaneously texts dealing with ethnographic data. As I discuss
elsewhere (Moore 2008:xiii–xiv), I am convinced that there is an important
dynamic between anthropological theory and ethnographic data. I do not
mean to suggest that theoretical positions arise from ethnographic observa-
tions in some mystical or uncritical process, nor am I suggesting that indi-
vidual anthropologists were not influenced by broader intellectual currents.
What I contend, however, is that anthropologists tend to write about and
modify their theoretical positions in the process of exploring specific sets of
ethnographic data, and conversely they will choose lines of ethnographic
research to examine certain theoretical propositions.
For that reason, I have chosen articles that combine ethnographic cases as
exemplifying theoretical propositions. For example, I think that Geertz’s
“Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example” gives us a much better in-
sight into interpretive anthropology than his later, much-praised and oft-
reprinted “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.”
Radcliffe-Brown’s extended discussion of kinship in Australia and else-
where, which comprises about 80 percent of the article “The Comparative
Method in Social Anthropology” gives a much clearer sense of his idea of
“social structure” than does his article “On Social Structure.” As Radcliffe-
Brown observed, “The only really satisfactory way of explaining a method is
by means of illustration”—which I consider very good advice. Leacock’s
Introduction ix
analysis of women in egalitarian societies grounds her theoretical perspec-
tive, simultaneously feminist and Marxist, in fundamental ethnographic de-
tail. In each article in this collection, I have chosen texts that demonstrate—
to paraphrase Lévi-Strauss—that anthropological theories are not only
important to think about, they are important tothink with.
As I mentioned above, this collection—like the companion volume, Visions
of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists (Moore
2008)—is written for students. The companion volume provides profiles of
each anthropologist and the intellectual milieu in which they lived. Visions of
Culture: An AnnotatedReaderintentionally does not repeat the material found
in the companion volume; they are designed to be used together.
In this volume, each selection is prefaced with a brief introduction about
the anthropologist and the text, referring the reader to relevant sections in
Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists.
This is followed by one or more primary texts, complete versions or edited
excerpts of original anthropological writings. (When selections have been
edited for length, the missing section is indicated by a trio of asterisks,
“***”.) Each primary text is followed by a section titled “Queries and Con-
nections,” a series of questions designed to help students focus on central
issues in a given text and the intersections between those ideas and concepts
explored by other anthropologists in other readings. While original foot-
notes have been maintained in general, sometimes it has been necessary to
modify or edit them; in addition, I have added editor’s notes to clarify spe-
cific issues or phrases in the texts.
A brief word about the selection of certain anthropologists and of specific
texts. The twenty-five anthropologists included here represent a cross-
section of major contributors to anthropological theory. Obviously, many
other scholars have contributed to theoretical discussions, but they simply
cannot all be included in a single volume. As the 3rd edition of Visions of
Cultue: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theoristswas in prepa-
ration, my editor, Alan McClare and his staff at AltaMira Press, sent a ques-
tionnaire out to professors across the United States who use the text in their
classes, asking for their advice about including or dropping anthropologists
from the book. The survey results were less than informative. The only con-
sensus was the need to include Marshall Sahlins in the texts, excellent ad-
vice and an excellent addition to the new edition. Beyond that, chaos
reigned: one professor recommended dropping all the French theorists
(Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu), another suggested eliminating
all the materialists (White, Steward, Harris, and Leacock), while another
proposed deleting anyone who worked before 1950. What we concluded
from this exercise in public opinion survey is that there was no consensus.
Again, this is a text written for students, and no one who either teaches
at a university or writes for a student audience can ignore the skyrocketing