Anthropology is, in one description, the academic discipline that took longest to become uncomfortable with itself, and longest again to do something about the discomfort. It began, in the second half of the nineteenth century, as armchair theorizing in the service of empire. It spent most of the twentieth century building an extraordinary archive of detailed ethnographic case studies — hundreds of them, on every continent, on every conceivable kind of small-scale human society. And then, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it turned around and asked the question that had been visible all along: who funded all this, and what knowledge could not be produced under those conditions?
The five essays in this pillar trace that arc — from Tylor and Morgan's evolutionary schemes, through Malinowski's invention of long-term immersive fieldwork, through the four-fields institutional bargain that distinguishes American anthropology from the rest of the world, through the kinship project that became the discipline's central technical problem and then was set aside, to the contemporary discipline that no longer organizes around a single object but does carry forward a recognizable style of attention.
Read in order if this is new territory; jump around if it is not.
The Origins of Anthropology
How a discipline built to justify empire became, over a century and a half, a discipline obsessed with critiquing the conditions of its own production.
Participant Observation
The method that made anthropology a discipline rather than a literature — and the unresolved question of what it is, exactly, you are doing when you do it.
The Four-Fields Model
A peculiarly American structural decision — that anthropology is biology, archaeology, linguistics, and ethnography under one roof — and what it has cost and bought.
Kinship & Structuralism
For sixty years anthropology's central project was to understand how marriage rules and kinship terminologies organize societies. Then, almost suddenly, it stopped.
Anthropology After 1980
The discipline turned reflexive, post-colonial, and politically explicit — and in doing so found itself unable to ignore the conditions that had once made it possible.