2019FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (1): 10–22

LECTURE

Deconstructing anthropology
First Annual Stephen F. Gudeman Lecture
Adam K U P E R , London School of Economics

This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology’s most venerable avatars. Classical theories invoked a certain
kind of person as the subject of anthropology. He was the savage, the tribal, the indigenous. More recently he became simply The
Other. Always, he was our mirror opposite, ourselves turned upside down in a fairground mirror. And the theories that tried to
explain this imaginary actor recycled a recurrent set of ideas and arguments about nature and culture, and savagery and civ-
ilization.
If we are to return to the real world we must free our thinking of these imaginary dichotomies, and set aside the repetitive
cycle of mythical transformations that they support. Begin with the recognition that we are very like the people we study. Then
construct a cosmopolitan anthropology that will confront current theories, models and methods with the experience and the
understanding of the people we live with as ethnographers.
Keywords: History and theory, culture, social evolution, cosmopolitan anthropology

I of our conversations, but with the great advantage that

Steve will have to sit quietly and listen.
Steve and I met in October, 1962, at King’s College, Back then, the small world of Cambridge social an-
Cambridge. We were both studying anthropology, we thropology was divided between two feuding parties.
were much the same age, in our early twenties, and One was led by Fortes, the other by Leach. Steve had
we were both foreigners in what was then a very En- weekly supervisions with Leach, and was one of his fa-
glish university town. Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach vorite students. As a fledgling Africanist, I had been re-
were fellows of King’s College, characterized by Leach cruited by Fortes.
as “a bastion of British upper-class values of the most Our two leaders were having terrific public rows.
archaic kind.”1 The issue was nothing less than human nature. Fortes
One drizzly autumn evening, Steve and I went for a believed that people—or at any rate, the sort of people
beer at The Eagle. There is now a blue plaque on the anthropologists were supposed to study, “tribal” folk—
wall of the pub: “It was here on February 28th 1953 that are brainwashed by rituals and kept in line by paternal
Francis Crick and James Watson first announced their authority, backed up by the ancestors. Their social struc-
discovery of how DNA carried genetic information.” tures are perpetual motion equilibrium machines. Group-
Watson actually said that they had discovered “the se- think is compulsory.2
cret of life.” Whatever. Crick and Watson were regulars Leach had rubbished all that in a scattershot mani-
at The Eagle. They might well have been there that very festo, Rethinking anthropology, and a combative mono-
evening. But we were busy. We had begun to talk about graph, Pul Eliya. Both books appeared in 1961, the year
anthropology. And anthropologists. We have kept talk- before Steve and I started talking in The Eagle. The key
ing ever since. I see this evening’s talk as a continuation premise of Leach’s polemics was that everybody, every-

1. Leach 1984: 11. 2. Kuper 2016.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 9, number 1. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/703730

© The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2019/0901-0003$10.00
11 DECONSTRUCTING ANTHROPOLOGY

where, is out for Number One. Competition is endemic, societies as moral systems and not as natural systems,
authority contested, social arrangements racked by in- that it is interested in design rather than in process, and
ternal contradictions. Rules are ambiguous and up for that it therefore seeks patterns and not scientific laws,
negotiation. Rituals are “play-acting and pretense.”3 and interprets rather than explains.”5
The Fortes/Leach stand-off was in part a clash of per- I read Evans-Pritchard’s lecture and tentatively sug-
sonalities. Differences in social background were not ir- gested to Fortes that I might want to introduce some his-
relevant. Nevertheless, the arguments between the two tory into my ethnography. He told me that I had to
men also had a lot to do with the great divide in British choose. I could be either an anthropologist or a historian.
social anthropology, between the party of Radcliffe- I should have known better. Fortes remained a Radcliffe-
Brown and the party of Malinowski. Back in the 1920s, Brown loyalist. When, a decade later, a critical article I
our founding fathers had agreed that the old arguments wrote on Radcliffe-Brown was accepted for publication
between evolutionists and diffusionists were beside the by Man, Fortes asked me to withdraw it.
point. Anthropologists should abandon historical recon- But if the party of Radcliffe-Brown was in crisis, all
structions and study how societies worked. It was soon was far from well in the Malinowski camp. Leach, the
apparent, however, that Radcliffe-Brown and Malinow- most brilliant of the Malinowskians, was even at war
ski had very different ideas about what they called prim- with himself. In the 1950s he became possessed by the
itive societies, and, especially, about how they worked. ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, Malinowski and
Radcliffe-Brown was a disciple of Émile Durkheim. Lévi-Strauss had very different ideas about human na-
He believed that the orderly functioning of primitive so- ture. Lévi-Strauss was a neo-Kantian philosopher. He
cieties was sustained by ritual performances of solidarity. represented the Amazonian Indians as idealist philoso-
Authority was sacred. Dissent was not only treason, it phers who lived out their lives in strict accordance with
was blasphemy. According to Malinowski, however, the their beliefs. A shaman might start off a phony, but he
people of the Trobriand Islands interpreted myths and would come to believe his own shtick.6 Malinowski saw
rituals to suit themselves, stretched the rules, gamed the the Pacific Islanders as realists, cynics and schemers.
system. “Whenever the native can evade his obligations When they preached, they were trying to pull the wool
without the loss of prestige, or without the prospective over your eyes. The anthropologist had to ignore the
loss of gain, he does so, exactly as a civilised business- spin and work out what the natives were really up to.
man would do.”4 Leach’s masterpiece, Political systems of Highland
The two men also had different ideas about science. Burma, was, he wrote, “organised as a kind of dialogue
Radcliffe-Brown was a positivist. Malinowski was a neo- between the empiricism of Malinowski and the rational-
positivist, with sophisticated concerns about the role of ism of Lévi-Strauss.”7 He gave Malinowski the best lines,
the observer. Radcliffe-Brown thought that scientific re- but, he confessed, “I feel that sometimes I am on both
search should proceed from observation to comparison sides of the fence.”8 He would say that he was a function-
and then finally to generalization. Malinowski liked to alist on weekdays, and a structuralist on Sundays.
generalize from the Trobriand Islanders to “savages” We research students enjoyed these polemics. As a
everywhere, and indeed to people anywhere. sort of salute to those early days, I thought that I might
These two parties had confronted one another for a have a go this evening at deconstructing some of anthro-
generation, but by the time that Steve and I became pology’s most venerable avatars.
regulars at The Eagle, they were both falling apart. Ed- My argument is that most anthropological controver-
ward Evans-Pritchard, once Radcliffe-Brown’s trusted sies belong in a museum of antique ideas. To put it an-
lieutenant, had converted to Catholicism and given up other way, the grand theories have a lot in common with
on social science. In fact, he turned a complete somer- myths. The same ideas, the same arguments, turn up
sault. He had been a positivist, like Radcliffe-Brown, but again and again, but each time in a new fancy dress.
in a public lecture at Oxford in 1950 he declared “that so-
cial anthropology is a kind of historiography, and there-
fore ultimately of philosophy or art, . . . that it studies 5. Evans-Pritchard [1950] 1962: 26.
6. Lévi-Strauss 1963: 167–85.
3. Leach 1961: 298. 7. Leach 1982: 44.
4. Malinowski 1926: 30. 8. Tambiah 2002: 40.
 Adam KUPER 12

Lévi-Strauss argued that a myth is best understood as a II

transformation of other myths. Each myth stands an-
other myth on its head, inverts story lines, draws alter- Steve worked his way through the central preoccupa-
native morals.9 In much the same way, anthropology’s tions of Cambridge anthropology, which had to do
theories and paradigms confront each other in a hall with kinship and the family. He wrote a structural anal-
of mirrors. ysis of compadrazgo, in the style of Leach and Lévi-
Fortes once told me that Leach had the public school- Strauss, which won him the Curle Essay Prize of the
boy idea that just by turning a proposition upside down Royal Anthropological Institute.13 His Cambridge doc-
he was being original. When I interviewed Leach for Cur- toral dissertation analyzed the family and household in
rent Anthropology, towards the end of his life, he put it rural Panama.14 Here, it seems to me, the influence of
this way: Meyer Fortes is apparent. Fortes argued that our primal
emotions are forged and our ethics learned in what he
the sequence is always dialectical. There was . . . a termed “the domestic domain.” He contrasted this do-
point in my anthropological development when Mali- mestic domain with the “politico-jural” domain, the
nowski could do no wrong. In the next phase Mali- realm of outside agencies that impose often uncomfort-
nowski could do no right. But with maturity I came able controls and obligations on families and house-
to see that there was merit on both sides. I see this holds. These two domains were never perfectly aligned,
as a Hegelian process, a very fundamental element in but together they ordered life choices.15 This model
the way that thinking in the humanities develops over would feed into Steve’s conception of what he called
time. But when this sequence leads you round in a cir- the “house economy,” or “the base,” which operates ev-
cle, you are not just back where you started. You have
erywhere in tension with the economy of the market.
moved on a bit, or you have moved somewhere else.
We took the kinship stuff seriously, but even rookies
But always the process involves the initial rejection of
your immediate ancestors, the teachers to whom you like ourselves could see that those Cambridge debates
are most directly indebted.10 were narrow and parochial. Nobody was interested in
the history of the discipline. (After all, those old ideas
It is not only anthropologists who hark back obses- had been exploded. Surely?) We were supposed to focus
sively to old mentors and dead theorists. John Maynard on the work of a few, select, mainly British anthropolo-
Keynes famously remarked that “Practical men who be- gists, plus Durkheim, Mauss, and perhaps Lévi-Strauss.
lieve themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual We were not encouraged to read any American anthro-
influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct econo- pologists later than Lewis Henry Morgan, who had died
mist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, in 1881. (And Morgan himself was of interest only be-
are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler cause he was credited with the invention of kinship the-
of a few years back.”11 In his Conversations in Colombia, ory. Nobody bothered to tell us that his version of social
Steve reported that Panamanian peasant farmers were in evolutionism had been endorsed by Marx and Engels,
thrall to the economic theory of the eighteenth-century and became the orthodoxy of Soviet and Chinese anthro-
French Physiocrats. Very like those Colombian peasants, pology.16)
anthropologists in the twenty-first century struggle to Steve had broader horizons. As an undergraduate at
break free from intellectual paradigms that date back Harvard, he had studied under Evan Vogt and Clyde
two hundred years. So I will make a historical argument. Kluckhohn. In a recent interview, he confessed that
This is all the more appropriate since, by my reckoning, throughout his career he has been torn between European
Steve and I have practiced anthropology for one quarter social anthropology and American cultural anthropology.17
of the history of our discipline. And as William Faulkner
wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”12
13. Gudeman 1971.
14. Gudeman 1976.
9. Descola 2016. 15. Kuper 2016.
10. Kuper 1986: 380. 16. Kan and Arzyutov 2016.
11. Keynes 1936: 383–84. 17. Interviewed by Alan MacFarlane in 2010. http://www
12. Faulkner 1951: 73 (Act 1, Scene 3). .alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/gudeman.htm
13 DECONSTRUCTING ANTHROPOLOGY

But our teachers at Cambridge knew little about American III

anthropology, and they cared less. They seldom travelled to
AAA meetings. The reason was, apparently, quite simple. So what was happening in American cultural anthro-
British and American anthropologists were talking about pology? This had become a large and complex enter-
different things. American anthropology was about “cul- prise after World War II, certainly as compared to Brit-
ture.” The British treated culture as an epiphenomenon. So- ish or French social anthropology. It was also more
cial relations were what really mattered. We were reminded diverse intellectually, and it cast its nets more widely.
that in Europe the widow wears black, the bride wears Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century the field
white. In China, traditionally, white was for funerals, red was riven by a feud between two parties, the social evo-
was for weddings. But whatever color their dresses might lutionists and the cultural relativists.
be, brides were brides, and widows were widows. As Leach In the late nineteenth century, the key institutions of
put it: “Culture provides the form, the ‘dress’ of the social American anthropology were to be found at the Smith-
situation . . . The same kind of structural relationship sonian Institution in Washington, DC. These were the
may exist in many different cultures and be symbolised Bureau of American Ethnology and the Ethnology De-
in correspondingly different ways.”18 partment of the Museum of Natural History. Both were
Raymond Firth, the dean of the small community of directed by social evolutionists, influenced by the theo-
British social anthropologists, pointed out that there ries of Lewis Henry Morgan. University departments
were nevertheless some proper social anthropologists of anthropology came later. The most important was
in the USA. He suggested that Fred Eggan—who had, established by a German immigrant, Franz Boas, who
after all, been Radcliffe-Brown’s student at Chicago— founded a graduate school of anthropology at Columbia
should be invited to bring over a few of their up-and- University in 1899. Boas had been trained in the Berlin
coming young men for an Anglo-American summit. school of ethnology, under Adolf Bastian. The Berlin
This came to pass at Jesus College, Cambridge, in June school had no time for the social evolutionism that was
1963.19 Steve and I were dispatched to the Cambridge favored by the Smithsonian people. Their focus was on
railway station to pick up two of the young American regional cultural histories, migrations, and the diffusion
visitors, Marshall Sahlins and Eric Wolf. (They cracked of ideas and techniques.
up when we told the cabby to take us to Jesus.) The Boas’s department at Columbia University was virtu-
American delegation—or, as Eric Wolf remarked, the ally a branch of the Berlin school. In due course, his pro-
delegation from the University of Chicago—also in- tégés took the Berlin doctrines to new anthropology de-
cluded Clifford Geertz and David Schneider. On the partments in Chicago, Philadelphia and Berkeley. One
whole, everyone was being diplomatic, but Schneider key idea was that race, language, and culture vary in-
caused a fuss by dismissing the whole field of kinship dependently. Another was that cultures, or civilizations,
studies, which was the ark of the covenant of British so- are loosely organized composites, not integrated wholes,
cial anthropology. (Schneider recalled, “it was a good and that they are open to the world rather than closed in
chance for me to essentially say, ‘Fuck off! I’ve had it on themselves. Boas’s faithful interpreter, Robert Lowie,
with that stuff.’ And that was good.”20) summed up this doctrine in two slogans. Cultures “de-
velop mainly through the borrowings due to chance con-
tact.” Consequently, a civilization is a “planless hodge-
podge . . . a thing of shreds and patches.”21 It would
obviously be absurd to suppose that all those “planless
hodgepodges” follow the same historical trajectory, or
that such “a thing of shreds and patches” forms an or-
18. Leach 1954: 16–17. ganic unity, as romantic nationalists liked to suppose.
19. This was in fact the annual meeting of the Association of Boas was also a relativist. In an early confrontation
Social Anthropologists of Britain and the Common- with the Smithsonian people, he insisted that “civiliza-
wealth, usually a small event at that time, with fewer than tion is not something absolute, but . . . is relative, and . . .
a hundred participants. The joint meeting led to the pub-
lication of the first four ASA Monographs, which pub-
lished most of the papers given at the meeting.
20. Schneider 1995: chapter 7. 21. Lowie 1920: 440–41.
 Adam KUPER 14

our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our worlds, not the same world with different labels at-
civilization goes.”22 Perhaps above all, however, he tached.”29
was an empiricist. He once told a graduate student that Margaret Mead suggested that Sapir and Benedict
“there are two kinds of people: those who have to have were just bringing Boas up to date,30 but Lowie, an old-
general conceptions into which to fit the facts; those school Boasian, would have none of that. He dismissed
who find the facts sufficient. I belong to the latter cat- Sapir’s ideas about culture as “beyond the sphere of sci-
egory.”23 ence altogether.”31 Yet whatever the old guard thought
In practice, Boas was most at ease when wielding about it, the second generation of Boasians embraced a
facts to demolish theories. Big ideas about race and cul- full-blown cultural holism. And, inevitably, this pro-
ture were demonstrably false, or, at best, premature. voked a reaction. And, predictably, the challenge to the
The Boasians particularly enjoyed picking to pieces culturalists came from the social evolutionist camp.
the grand narratives of the social evolutionists. How- In fact, two neo-evolutionist schools of thought
ever, all that nit-picking could be dispiriting. Roman emerged in the 1950s. One, led by Leslie White, was in-
Jakobson suggested that if Boas had been charged to spired by Karl Marx. Societies progressed through stages:
tell the world about the epoch-making voyage of Chris- hunter-gatherers with their patrilineal bands; tribesmen
topher Columbus, he would have said: the hypothesis with their clans and lineages; chiefdoms, with their hi-
that there is a shorter sea-route to India has been dis- erarchies; and then, finally, states. The mode of produc-
proved.24 Alfred Kroeber, an old-school Boasian, put tion explained everything. There was also an ecological
his finger on the problem: “As long as we continue of- strain, that explained apparently bizarre customs, ritu-
fering the world only reconstructions of specific detail, als, or taboos as unconscious but wonderfully effective
and consistently show a negativistic attitude towards ways of adapting to the environment.32
broader conclusions, the world will find very little of The other neo-evolutionist school followed Herbert
profit in ethnology. People do want to know why.”25 Spencer rather than Marx. Its sympathies were with cap-
Kroeber himself came up with a theory of cultural italism rather than communism, and with imperialism
patterns, and what he called configurations of culture rather than the new Third World utopianism. Before
growth.26 These ideas did not catch on. Edward Sapir, World War II, American anthropology had been a small,
Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, second-generation insecure discipline, concerned almost exclusively with
Boasians, felt that it was time to change course. Like the the Native American population. But in 1945 the United
functionalists in Britain, they were not very interested States emerged as the leading global power. The Euro-
in history, but, instead of Durkheimian sociology, they pean and Japanese empires collapsed. Competing with
went in for psychoanalytic ideas. And they embraced the Soviet Union and Communist China to capture hearts
the romantic, organic view of culture, celebrated by Sa- and minds, the United States was now drawn, willy-nilly,
pir in his essay, “Culture, genuine and spurious,”27 and into nation building.
by Ruth Benedict in her Patterns of culture, which drew Providentially, a theory of development was to hand.
on Nietzsche and Spengler.28 This encouraged excur- It was widely assumed that all the former colonies, now
sions to the wilder shores of relativism. Sapir put it new states, were very similar to one another, and that
best: “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar they shared a common destiny. They probably would,
to be considered as representing the same social reality. certainly they should, repeat the evolution of the United
The worlds in which different societies live are distinct States itself. They had already advanced from colony to

22. Boas 1887.

23. Cited by Kluckhohn and Prufer 1959: 22. 29. Sapir 1929 (1949): 162.
24. Jacobson 1944: 194. 30. Mead 1972: 126.
25. Kroeber 1920: 380. 31. Lowie 1965.
26. Kroeber 1944. 32. If anyone wants to recover this way of thinking, I rec-
ommend a reading of Marvin Harris’s Rise of anthropo-
27. Sapir 1924. logical theory: A history of theories of culture, published
28. Benedict 1934. in that revolutionary year, 1968.
15 DECONSTRUCTING ANTHROPOLOGY

republic. Now that they were free, they must become Anthropologists felt that they were on the front line.
capitalists. One response was to embrace a Marxist version of evo-
An economist, Walt Whitman Rostow, plotted the lutionism and look forward to the end of capitalism and
path to be followed in a book, published in 1960, entitled imperialism. An alternative reaction—equally venera-
The stages of economic growth. A non-Communist mani- ble, perhaps less likely to damage career prospects—
festo. These stages of growth were oddly, even eerily, rem- was to reject the narrative of modernization. There was
iniscent of those described in the Communist manifesto a revival of cultural romanticism. Formerly left-wing in-
itself. The first stage was “traditional society,” the second tellectuals now talked up the importance of identity and
“transitional society.” Then came “take-off.” (Rocket ship difference. By the 1970s, it was Herder and Nietzsche
metaphors were much in vogue at the time. Sputnik and and Spengler all over again.
all that.) After a “mature stage” came the “age of high Consider the intellectual trajectories of Clifford
mass consumption.” If the new states accepted Rostow’s Geertz and Marshall Sahlins, two of the most influen-
guidance, and put themselves on the side of history, they tial American anthropologists of the post-World War II
would become rich, and consume masses of stuff. Not generation. In 1952, Geertz and his wife, graduate stu-
only that, they would progress, develop, become civi- dents in anthropology at Harvard, were recruited to join
lized, or, in the new idiom, modernize. an interdisciplinary team that was being assembled by
And surely the time was ripe. In 1961, in a memo to a new Center for International Studies at MIT. The
President Kennedy, Rostow wrote that “barring a catas- Center was directed by the CIA’s former Director of
trophe, it is likely that a good many of the countries in the Economic Research, Max Milliken. Walt Rostow was a
underdeveloped world will during the 1960s, either com- key member. Clifford and Hildred Geertz and their col-
plete the take-off process or be very far advanced in it.”33 leagues were dispatched to Java. Their mission was to
Kennedy was impressed. He brought Rostow into his ad- identify the conditions for “take-off” in Indonesia.
ministration and launched the Alliance for Progress to Geertz’s initial assessment was optimistic. “Indonesia
modernize Latin America. is now, by all the signs and portents, in the midst of such
Unfortunately, progress towards a civilized condition, a pre-take-off period,” he wrote, and he claimed to see
or rather modernization, turned out to be unexpectedly “the beginnings of a fundamental transformation in so-
difficult. There were obstructions in the path of history. cial values and institutions toward patterns we generally
The problem was soon identified. It was, of course, all associate with a developed economy.”34 His first publi-
down to culture. The new states were hobbled by ancient cations looked forward to the triumph of a nationalist
enmities, foolish traditions, and dysfunctional customs. ideology that would transcend religious divisions, and
The anthropologists, the culture mavens, were called in to the mobilization of indigenous elites who would man-
to account for the dead weight of tribalism, superstition, age the imminent economic “take-off.” But things did
and conservatism. American anthropology went global, not go to plan in Indonesia. By the time Geertz came
and the field began a wonderful phase of growth, even to that Anglo-American conference in Cambridge in
if the former colonies did not themselves enjoy the same 1963, he was changing course, giving up on moderniza-
good fortune. tion and becoming a culturalist. His Cambridge presen-
But while there might be road-blocks, even detours on tation, later a canonical text of the new movement, was
the way, the modernization narrative envisaged a happy “Religion as a cultural system.” From this point on he
end-point, even the end of history. All nations were bound would insist that anthropology should be not a social sci-
to become liberal democracies. All economies would be ence but rather a kind of hermeneutics, its sole agenda
capitalist powerhouses. By the early 1960s, however, the “the interpretation of cultures.” And culture was now
Vietnam War was casting a terrible shadow on those redefined, or, as Geertz put it, cut down to size.35 A text,
optimistic scenarios. In 1966, Rostow became the na- or perhaps a discourse, culture represented “an ordered
tional security advisor to Lyndon Johnson. He doubled system of meanings and symbols.”36
down on the promises of his “non-Communist mani-
festo.” And he was a hawk on Vietnam. But opposition
to the war grew. American campuses were in turmoil. 34. Geertz 1963: 1.
35. Geertz 1973: 4.
33. Latham 1998: 199. 36. Geertz 1973: 245.
 Adam KUPER 16

The young Marshall Sahlins was the coming man customs and institutions of the old economy constituted
in the neo-evolutionist school.37 His paper at that 1963 a barrier to modernization. Steve recalls that “modern-
Cambridge conference, “On the sociology of primitive ization theories . . . offered a solution to the awkward
exchange,” became a classic of social evolutionism. But presence of house economies. They are traditional sys-
then, in 1968, he spent a sabbatical year in Paris. This tems. With capital investment, technical education . . . ,
was a year of student uproar, a time of surrealist slogans the proper incentives, and the improvement of infra-
and passionate, unruly teach-ins. Many young peo- structure . . . . House economies will disappear. Rural
ple were converting to Marxism. Sahlins himself had inhabitants will join market life.”41
been a Marxist for years. Now he turned a somersault, But then, as the contradictions in the modernization
abandoned dialectical materialism, and embraced Lévi- policy became apparent, the sugar price crashed. The
Strauss’s structuralism. He produced structuralist inter- mills closed. In his monograph, The demise of a rural
pretations of Hawaiian myths. More recently, he has be- economy, Steve described the sad aftermath: “[Torri-
come a cultural determinist and a convert to David jos’] modernist project led to the end of the house econ-
Schneider’s ideas about kinship.38 omy in the village where I had lived.”42
In 1969, a newly minted Cambridge PhD, Steve
moved back to the US, to the University of Minnesota.
He was a good decade younger than Geertz and Sahlins, IV
but he was undergoing a similar intellectual evolution. Disillusioned now with modernization theory, Steve
Like Geertz, he had started out with a modernization took a culturalist turn, like Geertz and Sahlins. His Eco-
project. His first field studies in rural Panama, spon- nomics as culture, subtitled Models and metaphors of
sored by the Harvard Business School, were funded by livelihood, presented a range of vernacular conceptions
the Agency for International Development. This agency of the economy.43 I think, though, that this exercise left
had been set up in the State Department by President him dissatisfied. He now moved on to a more complex
Kennedy, advised by Rostow. Its mission was to pro- synthesis, drawing on the central debate in American
mote modernization. Rostow personally “first cleared economic anthropology. Here, too, a bitter feud was
the project” that sent Steve to Panama.39 raging, between the Formalists and the Substantivists.44
The government of Panama had set the country on a This divide went back to Karl Polanyi’s legendary sem-
forced march to economic modernization. It promoted inars at Columbia University in the 1940s.
peasant cultivation of sugar cane for the export market. An original thinker in the Marxist tradition, Polanyi
Later the authorities took over blocks of land and hired contrasted two stages of economic organization.45 Pre-
local farmers as laborers. And then, influenced by a modern economies produce goods in family units. Be-
Harvard Business School report that Steve helped to tween equals, goods and services were exchanged as
produce, the dictator of Panama, General Torrijos, built gifts. Chiefs demanded tribute payments and they cor-
sugar mills. However, there were hidden costs. Sugar ralled their followers to do public works. Then, fol-
cane displaced food crops. Subsistence farmers had to lowing what Polanyi called “the great transformation,”
use their meager cash earnings to buy household essen- modern market economies emerged. Marshall Sahlins
tials. Sugar cultivation impoverished the soil. attended Polanyi’s seminars, and he developed case
Steve found there was no way that an ethnographer studies of economies without markets, which were col-
could make the planners in Panama City realize what lected in his Stone age economics (1972).
was happening on the ground. They refused even to “Substantivists” like Sahlins thought that to under-
visit the villages. “They were working at the market end,” stand a “stone age economy” it was necessary to decode
Steve observes. “No language or concepts connected
us.”40 For the planners, it was an article of faith that the
41. Gudeman 2016: 124.
42. Gudeman 1978.
37. Sahlins 1960. 43. Gudeman 1986.
38. Kuper 2018. 44. To recapture the arguments of the day, see LeClair and
39. Gudeman 2016: 168. Schneider 1968.
40. Gudeman 2016: 170. 45. Polanyi 1944.
17 DECONSTRUCTING ANTHROPOLOGY

exotic cosmologies, and to unravel complicated sys- to say that a man deals with a kula exchange as though
tems of kinship and marriage. “Formalists” countered it was trade, gimwali. Everywhere it is illegitimate to try
that rational choice and the constraints of supply and to profit at the expense of relatives, friends or guests.
demand must operate even in non-market economies. On the other hand, a gift given at the wrong time, or
Polanyi himself later came to the view that the differ- in the wrong context, may be denounced as a bribe. And
ences between market and non-market systems were when people shop for Christmas gifts, they worry about
not absolute.46 After all, Marcel Mauss had remarked the “commercialization” of Christmas, which should be
that the economy of mutuality endures, even flourishes, spent in the bosom of the family, on a holiday from the
in capitalist societies.47 market economy.
Steve developed a more radical position. And this is Yet, however strictly the boundaries between the two
where his conception of what he called the “house econ- economies are policed, and despite the chronic tensions
omy” comes in. Everywhere, the house economy is as- between their values and strategies, the house and the
sociated with the ideal of family solidarity. It “aims market must somehow work together. The economy of
for sufficiency and nurtures social relationships,” Steve the house provides necessary back-up for the market
writes. In contrast, markets “are made up of separate ac- economy. Conversely, Steve points out, in “the compet-
tors focused on gain.”48 Nevertheless, these two very dif- itive search for profit, market economies can undermine
ferent economies normally have to operate side by side. themselves by destroying their base of purchasing power
“One is the high-relationship economy that is rooted in in the house.”50 Steve concludes that the rebalancing of
the house . . . Neglected by economic theory, it is prom- market and house economies is a constant, existential is-
inent in small-scale economies, and hidden and mysti- sue. The fateful error of the planners in Panama was to
fied yet salient in capitalism. The other side consists of assume that the house economy represented the past,
competitive trading. Anthropologists know one side of the market economy the future.
economy and economists know the other, but the two
are intertwined.”49
The crucial point is that the house economy is not a V
relic of a pre-market age. It can and does operate along- Looking back at American anthropology as it had been
side the market. That was the case in the Trobriand Is- in the sixties, Sherry Ortner recalled that there was, in
lands a century ago. That is true in Main Street, USA, the end, a stand-off between the two mainstream par-
to this day. The Trobrianders had both the kula gift ex- ties, the cultural relativists and the social evolutionists,
change and the gimwali, which was a tough-minded branded, back then, as “symbolic anthropology” and
system of bartering. Europe and the USA have the Christ- “cultural ecology.” Ortner found that each was “unable
mas kula, the wedding potlatch, and that peculiar hy- to handle what the other side did (the symbolic anthro-
brid, the family business. An economics that deals only pologists in renouncing all claims to ‘explanation,’ the
with the market will leave out a crucial dimension of the cultural ecologists in losing sight of the frames of mean-
economic experience of most people, most of the time, ing within which human action takes place).” Moreover,
wherever they may be. “both were also weak in what neither of them did, which
Yet although the market and house economies co- was much of any systematic sociology.”51
habit, they are not necessarily, or even usually, happily Ortner hoped that there would be a turn to sociology,
married. More typically, they are locked in an uneasy specifically to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of practice. In
partnership. Obliged to live together, they do their best the event, however, both the evolutionists and the cul-
to keep out of each other’s way. Nobody should confuse turalists doubled down. What followed can perhaps only
being a wheeler-dealer in the market with taking part in be explained by an appeal to Gregory Bateson’s concep-
a gift exchange. In the Trobriand Islands, it is an insult tion of schismogenesis (Bateson 1935, 1936), a process
by which confrontations drive the protagonists to adopt
more and more extreme positions.
46. Polanyi 1957: 256.
47. Mauss [1925] 1990: 98.
48. Gudeman 2016: 2–3. Cf. Gudeman 2008. 50. Gudeman 2016: 167.
49. Gudeman 2016: 2. 51. Ortner 1984: 134.
 Adam KUPER 18

The social evolutionists took up sociobiology. Their ture: The poetics and politics of ethnography.55 Branded,
inspiration was the discovery of the double helix struc- somewhat misleadingly, “post-modernism,” their ultra-
ture of DNA by Crick and Watson. The human genome relativism became the next big idea in American cultural
was being mapped. Medicine would be revolutionized. anthropology.
Social science could become truly scientific at last. I thought that the “postmodernists” were as wrong-
Ironically enough, James Watson himself had a low headed, in their own way, as the sociobiologists. A year
opinion of his Harvard colleague, E. O. Wilson, the lead- or so after Writing culture appeared, I visited the ethnol-
ing light of the new movement. Nor did he share ogy section of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The
Wilson’s faith in genetic determinism. Watson told an director invited me to talk about current trends in West-
interviewer that he and his wife used to debate the cause ern anthropology. I launched into a critique of post-
of their own son’s mental illness. “She said it was hered- modernism and was just getting into my stride when I
ity; I said it was the environment . . . I don’t really know realized that nobody had any idea what I was talking
now.”52 But Wilson had no doubt that practically every- about. So I backtracked, summarized the thesis of Writ-
thing we do is determined, unconsciously, by genetic ing culture, and then denounced it. In the discussion that
programs. Honed by eons of evolution, our instincts, followed, it became clear that I had converted the audi-
habits, and customs are geared to survival and reproduc- ence to postmodernism. A few months later I was visit-
tion. We are all still essentially hunter-gatherers, if not ing the ethnology department at one of the most right-
animals, or even birds and bees. Wilson was actually wing Afrikaans-language universities in South Africa.
an entomologist himself, but he came up with a theory They asked me to talk about new developments in the-
of the human condition. “The real problem of humanity ory. I duly made my case against postmodernism. They
is the following,” he pronounced, “we have paleolithic didn’t know what I was going on about. I backtracked,
emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technol- summarized the theory, and then demolished it. And I
ogy. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now ap- converted the whole audience to postmodernism.
proaching a point of crisis overall.”53 On reflection, this was not altogether surprising. In
From the culturalist camp, Sahlins delivered an abra- both Moscow and Bloemfontein, I had landed among
sive critique of sociobiology.54 For their part, Geertz and colleagues who were experiencing wrenching ideological
Schneider turned their backs on social science and on bi- challenges. In Moscow they had all been social evolution-
ology. They were now philosophical idealists, concerned ists. In Bloemfontein they had all been cultural deter-
only with the interpretation of symbolic discourses. So minists. Now the Russian anthropologists were living
there we were, divided, once again, between two views through the death throes of the Soviet system and the im-
of human nature. The old mind/body dichotomy had plosion of the Marxist theory of history. The South Afri-
come back to haunt the anthropologists. The sociobi- cans were witnessing the last rites of Apartheid, and the
ologists saw us as animals. To the culturalists, we were end of state-fostered cultural determinism. The Russian
spiritual beings, living in a world of our own imagining. and Afrikaner anthropologists were therefore delighted
And now the process of schismogenesis went into to discover that all theory is nothing but ideology. It
overdrive. Soon even Geertz, even Sahlins, were left be- wasn’t just them. Everyone had been deluded.
hind. Geertz’s program was too tame for the post- Why, then, did the postmodernist message appeal
Vietnam War generation. There was a whiff of Western to a new generation of American anthropologists? I
arrogance about it. How could Geertz pretend to read speak tentatively here, as an ethnographer must when
the minds of Javanese? And which Javanese, precisely? talking to the natives, but my sense is that an extreme
And in any case, meaning was not that easy to pin down. cultural relativism tied in with broader ideological ten-
The young guns had read Derrida. Interpretation was dencies, and in particular, with identity politics and a
out, deconstruction was in. In 1986 James Clifford and pervasive suspicion of science. Any talk about truth
George Marcus edited a collective manifesto, Writing cul- was taken as a sign of naiveté. Presented with a vexing
objection to one’s views, the key question to ask was
52. Thompson 1989. not, is that true, but rather: Where is he coming from?
53. “An intellectual entente,” Harvard Magazine, October 9,
2009.
54. Sahlins 1976. 55. Clifford and Marcus 1986.
19 DECONSTRUCTING ANTHROPOLOGY

VI nographer does. It is relevant, also, for theoretical work.

My deepest concern about the state of anthropology is
Bateson warned that a process of schismogenesis is lia- that there are too few urgent conversations about ideas.
ble to end in a crash. There certainly were a lot of crashes, But luckily for me, Steve has been coming to Europe for
and some American anthropology departments were longish stays, mostly at the Max Planck Institute for So-
broken into pieces. But, of course, most anthropologists cial Anthropology in Halle, where he and Chris Hann,
in the USA and Europe were skeptical of these intellec- another ex-Cambridge anthropologist, launched a proj-
tual cargo cults. They thought it was possible, and worth- ect on economy and society. Steve and I set up work-
while, to try to understand, at first hand, how other peo- shops at meetings of the European Association of Social
ple were getting on with their lives. Anthropologists, drawing in young colleagues. And we
Steve rejected the postmodernist conceit that eth- picked up on our own long-running conversation.
nographies are fabrications, to be read only in order
to uncover their dishonest rhetorical trickery. He knew
very well that ethnographers, like immigrants, can find VII
out how things work in another society. But he recog- So where do we stand now? Steve may insist that I speak
nized that ethnographies could do with more openness only for myself. Well then, speaking for myself, my hope
and reflexivity. In 1984, he began a new field study, in is for an anthropology that is realist, cosmopolitan, and
Colombia, together with Alberto Rivera, a Colombian inter-disciplinary. To get there, we must be clear about
who had studied with him at the University of Minne- what—and who—we are studying, and why, and, of
sota. They travelled about the Andean countryside, in- course, how.
terviewing peasant farmers, and, as they drove from Anthropology started out as the science of the savage,
one village to another, they discussed what they were or the primitive. This mythical creature was a shape
learning from their interviews. Gradually they drew shifter. (Almost always, however, he was a man.) For
their informants into these conversations. At some stage Rousseau—and for his disciple, Lévi-Strauss—he was
they began to recognize parallels between the largely the last free man, at one with nature and yet wonderfully
implicit economic assumptions of the campesinos and attuned to the spirit world. For Lévy-Bruhl, he was pre-
the theories of the French Physiocrats, pioneer econo- logical. In Freudian fantasy, he was polymorphically pro-
mists of the 1760s and 1770s. The Physiocrats them- miscuous. Malinowski and Mauss and Sahlins—and,
selves had drawn on contemporary European folk ideas sometimes, Gudeman—represented him as the polar op-
about economics, ideas that Spanish peasant immigrants posite of Economic Man.
brought to Colombia. And so the scope of the conversa- Anthropologists would now be embarrassed to talk
tions broadened once more, to encompass echoes of ear- about primitive peoples, or stone age societies (though
lier conversations, in other places. The end product was the new perspectivists share Lévi-Strauss’s romantic
the monograph Conversations in Colombia, which ap- ideas about the Neolithic). A generation ago, with decol-
peared in 1990.56 onization and “modernization,” there was a move to re-
Steve and Alberto Rivera were doing their best to brand anthropology as the science of the Other. As it
understand the ways in which the Andean campesinos turned out, however, this Other was still our opposite
made sense of things in their own terms. However, Steve number, our alter-ego, our own image turned upside
was no longer content with the idealist perspective that down in a fairground mirror.
he had adopted in his Economics as culture. Folk models A more realistic starting point would be the recogni-
help people to think about the world, and they may tion that we are all the same kind of person, though dif-
sometimes guide action, but they do not by themselves ferently situated. According to Bruno Latour, We have
account for the ways in which families choose to earn never been modern.57 I am not so sure about that. At least
and save and spend. There is analytical, even theoreti- since Columbus, perhaps even since Marco Polo, every-
cal, work to be done in order to explain those real-world one is modern. It is also true that most of us are also
choices.
The model of fieldwork as a conversation is a potent
counter to the postmodernist fantasy of what the eth- 57. Latour 1991. For an excellent discussion of Latour’s
ideas, see a special number of the journal Social Anthro-
56. Gudeman with Rivera 1990. pology (Legrain and van de Port 2013).
 Adam KUPER 20

rather traditional. Rational enough, at least much of the poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profes-
time, yet susceptible to mystification. Increasingly inter- sion.”61 A cosmopolitan anthropology will test estab-
connected, and yet at once local and global, homebodies lished theories, models, and methods in different con-
and traders, dreamers and schemers, agents and patients. ditions, and it will confront these models and methods
The fact is that we ourselves are very like the people we with the experience and the understanding of the peo-
study, although we may operate with different tools, and ple we live with as ethnographers.
in other circumstances. What, then, about our theories? For two centuries,
This is not a new idea. On the eve of World War II, cultural anthropologists were either social evolutionists
toward the end of his short life, Edward Sapir distanced or cultural determinists. The evolutionists tried to ar-
himself from his early relativism. Discussing Ruth Ben- range all societies into a series from primitive to civi-
edict’s Patterns of culture, he told his class at Yale: “I lized. The culturalists imagined a world made up of
suspect that individual Dobu and Kwakiutl are very like unique, local forms of life. Elsewhere, in their own echo
ourselves; they just are manipulating a different set of chamber, the social anthropologists took their ideas
patterns . . . You have to know the individual before from the social sciences, though all too often from yes-
you know what the baggage of his culture means to terday’s theorists. And then, on the other side of a more
him.”58 At virtually the same time, Malinowski re- and more impenetrable boundary wall, physical anthro-
marked that when he started out as an anthropologist, pologists huddled. They pushed biological explanations,
in the early twentieth century, the emphasis had been but their paradigms changed every decade. First, every-
on the differences between peoples. “I recognised their thing was determined by race; then by cranial capacity;
study as important,” he wrote, in a scribbled draft for a then by animal instinct; then by kin selection; then by
never-to-be written textbook on anthropology, “but un- genes for this and that. Perhaps we are all the unrecon-
derlying sameness I thought of greater importance & structed descendants of hunter-gatherers. Recently we
rather neglected.”59 were told that it all comes down to synapses in the brain.
Our informants may tell tall stories about animals Only one part of the doctrine has remained constant: the
with human characters, spirits with human passions, vir- claim that biology trumps culture.
gin births, magic rings, angels and demons; and yet they But it may not be necessary to start from a fully-
will behave most of the time very much as you or I would fledged theoretical position. It is sometimes a good idea
behave, if we were dealt the same hands, and confronted to begin with a question rather than an answer: a ques-
with the same options. So if we want to understand those tion of fact, or a puzzle to be solved, or a problem to be
realistic, pragmatic and cosmopolitan people, our con- sorted out. “What, in heaven’s name, are we trying to
temporaries, we need a realistic, pragmatic, cosmopoli- find out?”62 as Edmund Leach demanded back in 1962,
tan anthropology. at the very moment that Steve and I were beginning to
And a cosmopolitan and realistic anthropology is talk about anthropology.
needed out there in the world. Very nearly all social sci- Once a question is posed and a tentative answer put
ence research funding goes to the study of the in- forward, a conversation should follow: a frank, egalitar-
habitants of North America and the European Union. ian and open-ended conversation, a sort of ideal semi-
Ninety-six per cent of the subjects of studies reported nar. Critics, outsiders—even other kinds of anthropol-
in the leading American psychology journals are drawn ogists—should be invited to join in.63 It will quickly
from Western industrial societies.60 Mainstream eco- become apparent what sort of evidence may be relevant
nomics journals publish more papers dealing with the here, and what kinds of arguments are on offer. With
United States than with Europe, Asia, Latin America, luck, robust and testable hypotheses will be hammered
the Middle East and Africa combined, according to a out. Perhaps the questions will be recast. In any case, the
report in the Economist. And, the report noted, eco- conversation moves on.
nomics is very largely a science of the rich: “The world’s

58. Irvine 1994: 183. 61. “The useful science?,” Economist, January 4, 2014.
59. Cited by Young 2004: 76. 62. Leach 1962: 131.
60. Arnett 2008. 63. See Kuper and Marks 2011.
21 DECONSTRUCTING ANTHROPOLOGY

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Adam KUPER is a specialist on the ethnography of Southern Africa, and he has published widely on the history and
theory of anthropology. He was the first president of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and he has
taught anthropology in Uganda, England, Sweden, Holland, France, and the USA. He is currently a visiting professor
of anthropology at Boston University and at the London School of Economics.
Adam Kuper
[email protected]