Anthropology, Archaeology, and Sociology

This is the homepage for the Anthropology, Archeology, and Sociology category, a subcategory of Thought.

Some general resources:

• SparkNotes Sociology
• Crash Course Sociology YT playlist
• School of Life Sociology YT playlist (created by Anna Csiki-Fejer)

Jeffrey Alexander

Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons

Talal Asad

He criticized Clifford Geertz for ignoring religion as a source of social power and instead overemphasizing the “moods and motivations” encouraged by systems of belief.

Mary Catherine Bateson

the daughter of anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.

Composing a Life

• 1989
• about how women were forced to treat “life as an improvisatory art”

Gregory Bateson

A British-born anthropologist, the third husband of Margaret Mead, and father of Mary Catherine Bateson. He was the pioneer of “photographic analysis”

Bateson’s seven propositions on the “economics of flexibility” contain “successive genotypic innovations make multiplicative demands upon the soma”.

Bateson wrote that the Baining were “unstudiable” and failed to “exhibit much activity beyond the mundane routines of daily work”.

One of Bateson’s books includes “metalogues” with titles like “Why do Frenchman?” and “Why a Swan?”.

Bateson formulated the double-bind theory of schizophrenia with Don Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland. A “double bind” is a situation that arises from the “paradoxes of abstraction in communication”.

Bateson detailed the relationship between wau and laua in a certain New Guinea tribe, an analysis which would later incorporate ideas borrowed from cybernetics.

Bateson claimed that knowledge belongs to a hierarchy of classes in his formulation of symmetrical and complementary schismogenesis

Bateson argued that Balinese society exhibits stasis rather than schismogenesis

Steps to an Ecology of Mind

• collected essays
• learning a teacher’s implicit goals is critical to higher level understanding
• distinguished five levels of learning and defined Learning II as the “change in the process of Learning I”, which he called “deutero-learning”

Naven

• based on anthropological fieldwork in in New Guinea
• naven ritual/gender-reversal ceremony of the latmul people
• coined the terem “schismogenesis” to describe the process by which social divisions are created
• used the mutually reinforcing behaviors of exhibitionism and admiration as an example of complementary schismogenesis

Mind and Nature

• borrowed a term from C.S. Pierce and argued that “all thought would be totally impossible in a universe in which abduction was not expectable” while claiming that human learning was a stochastic process.

“From Versailles to Cybernetics”

• identified two attitudinal turning points in his lifetime, “the two historic events of the 20th century”
• Treaty of Versailles demoralized Western civilization
• compared the effects of the Treaty of Versailles to the curse of Atreus
• cybernetics provides “the means of achieving a new and perhaps more human outlook”

Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry

• with Jurden Ruesch
• distinguishes between three types of codification in communication: digital, analogic, and gestalt

Robert Bellah

Max Weber and World-Denying Love

• lecture
• traces Weber’s essay “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions”

Ruth Benedict

1887-1948. An anthropologist who was a colleague and mentor of Margaret Mead. She was a student of Alfred Kroeber. She was snubbed in replacing her mentor, Franz Boas, at Columbia.

Patterns of Culture

• studied the Zuni (New Mexico), Dobu (New Guinea), and Kwaikiutl (Vancouver Island) cultures, which came partly from her mentor Boas’ fieldwork
• culture is “personality writ large” (a riff on Durkheims definition of God as “society writ large”)
• culture is the shared beliefs and eperiences of a people
• used the analogy of a cup used to drink from “the river of life”
• promoted cultural relativism
• contrasted Native American cultures through Nietzsche’s opposites of “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”
  • described how worshippers of Apollo emphasize order
• used information collected by Reo Fortune
• begins with “Science of Custom”

The Chrysnathenum and the Sword

• requested by the U. S. government while Benedict was consulting for the Offices of War information
• contrasts World War II-era Japanese and American cultures
• claims America is a “guilt culture” while Japan is a “shame culture”
• Described freedom and indulgence in Japan as a U shape, maximized for babies and the old
• claimed the Japanese consider themselves “debtors to the ages and to the world”, owing everything to parents, friends, and employers
• Benedict was not actually able to visit Japan because of travel restrictions
  • therefore used war propaganda, the diaries of captured soldiers, newspaper clippings, literature, film, and the work of John Embriee
  • “anthropology ata distance”
• chapters
  • “The Dilemma of Virtue”
  • “Repaying One Ten-Thousandth”, virtue begins when the process of gratitude becomes active
  • “The Child Learns”, discusses the practice of shaking a baby’s head and hands to put it through the “motion of manners”
• held to have shaped American opinions about Japan, but sold just 28,000 copies between 1946 and 1971
• went back on the best-seller listts when it was translated by the Taiwanese anthropologist Huang Dao-Ling

Zuni Mythology

• based on research with various American Indian tribes in the Southwest

“The Races of Mankind”

• with Gene Weltfish
• an attempt to dispel racism/counteract racial tension
• cartoon-illustrated pamphlet
• opens with “The World is Shrinking” section
  • opens by describing the “delegates of a hundred nations” at the UN
• prescribes freedom from fear as a cure for prejudice
• argued that the size of the brain from biometric head measuring has nothing to do with intelligence, insisting that every race had an equal potential for intelligence

“The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America”

• doctoral dissertation
• the effects of the concept of the guardian spirit were specific to certain tribes

For more information, see

• Qwiz5 article on Benedict
• NYT article on Benedict
• VCU’s Social Welfare History Project article on controversy around The Races of Mankind
• this Atlantic article on the female students of Boas, including Benedict
• Vassar Encyclopedia’s distinguished alumni biography of Benedict

Jesse Bernard

Criticized Margaret Mead’s generalizations about the feminine nature of the Arapesh.

Franz Boas

1858-1942. The father of modern and/or American anthropology. He was the first professor of anthropology at Columbia and taught a lot of famous people in the field: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Alfred Koeber, Zora Neal Hurston, etc. He conducted fieldwork on the Inuits of Baffin Island and the Kwaikiutl (now referred to as Kwakwaka’wakw) on Vancouver Island.

Franz Boas created the four-field approach, dividing anthropology into archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology (“stones”, “tones”, “bones”, and “thrones”), because Boas believed cultures are too complex to be studied from a singular perspective.

Franz Boas’s display of the Northwest Coast Indian Hall at the American Museum of Natural History reflects his philosophy of organizing artifacts by cultural area.

At the Chicago World’s Fair, Boas made a model village for fourteen Kwakiutl from British Columbia.

Boas claimed that “if the willingness of man to suffer should disappear”, then man would too.

Boas organized the Jessup North Pacific Expedition, sponsored by industrialist Morris Jesup, that investigated the peoples of the North Pacific for the American Museum of Natural History.

Boas traveled to Baffin Island to investigate the impact of the physical environment on native Inuit migrations. Boas erroneously claimed that the Inuit have an unusually high number of words for types of snow.

In the last chapter (“The Race Problem in Modern Society”) of one Boas work, Boas decries “attempts to impress one pattern of thought upon whole nations”.

In a book that questions the conception of the white race as culturally and physically superior, Boas dismissed concerns about racial purity as “imaginary” in a discussion of miscegenation.

In Boas’ fieldwork on the Kwaikiutl people of Vancouver Island, he broke with Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory of kinship. He concluded that human activity and thought must be understood in terms of the culture that originated them.

The Central Eskimo

• from his fieldwork on the Inuits of Baffin Island

The Mind of Primitive Man

• 1911
• describes a gift-giving ceremony/ceremony for the distribution of property known as the “potlatch”
• reproduced studies on the skull shapes of immigants and their children
• promotes Boas’ idea of methodological cultural relativism
• attacked scientific racism
• in the last chapter, “The Race Problem in Modern Society””

For more information, see

• Qwiz5 article on Boas
• For more info…

Matti Bunzl

Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition

Joseph Campbell

Campbell popularized Adolf Bastian’s theory of ethinc variations called “folk ideas” and universial “elementary ideas”.

In one work, Campbell used the image of a four-year old claiming that a burnt match is a witch to illustrate the play-acting nature of “primitive religion”

Campbell filmed a PBS documentary with journalist Bill Moyers at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch.

A four-part work by Campbell concludes with a volume titled after the “creative” form of the central concept,which progresses through stages like “the way of the seeded earth” and the “way of the celestial lights”.

In the last of a series of six interviews, Campbell distinguished between Maslow’s peak experiences and Joyce’s aesthetic epiphanies as part of a larger discussion about God and the idea of eternity.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

• cites Jung’s theory of archetypes
• developed the concept of the “monomyth”
• the Hero’s Journey
  • exemplified by the journey in the Odyssey, also Cu Chulainn and Perseus
  • name is derived from a passage in Finnegan’s Wake
  • 17-stage process, circle cut into two uneven parts
  • “separation - iniation - return”
  • “call to adventure”
  • “refusal of the call”
  • “crossing the threshold”
  • “road of trials”
  • “ultimate boon”

The Masks of God

With Henry Robinson, Campbell analyzed The Skin of our Teeth as an appropriation from Finnegan’s Wake.

Campbell used the phrase “Master of Two Worlds” to describe transcendental figures like Gautama and Jesus.

Georges Canguilhelm

The Normal and the Pathological

• the first part is dedicated to a critique of the conceptions of normality espoused by Claude Bernard and Auguste Comte

Randall Collins

Weberian Sociological Theory

• 1986
• revived the use of Weber’s ideas in the U.S.

Auguste Comte

Comte was the French founder founder of positivism and the first to use the term “sociology.” He was a student/secretary of utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon.

Comte’s “second career”, brought on by the death of Clotilde de Vaux, included his attempt to establish seven atheistic sacraments for the future.

Comte proposed dividing the year into 13 months of 28 days, with an extra day to commemorate the dead. He suggested that the months be named after Moses and Homer.

Comte put forth the idea of a six-membered hierarchical complexity of sciences, beginning with the simplest, astronomy, and ending with social science, during which he coined the term “altruism”.

The distinction between social structure and social change originated from the distinction Compte drew between social statics and social dynamics.

Comte’s quest for discovering “invariant laws of the natural and social laws” was pursued through observation, experimentation, and comparison.

Comte’s normative theory envisioned a future in which people would “live for others”.

Comte argued that language, religion, and division of labor held human communities together.

The Course in Positive Philosophy

• “law of three stages”
  • human society moves from a theological to a metaphysical stage to the positive stage
  • theological stage = animism to polytheism to monothesim
  • metaphysical stage = pseudo-scientific
  • positive stage = scientific methods can solve the word’s prolem, based on science and empirical observation
• “encyclopedic scale”
  • hierachy of six fundamental sciences

System of Positive Polity

• “Religion of Humanity”
  • divinities called the Grand Fetish, or the Great Earth, and the Grand Milieu, or the Cosmic Space
  • inspired the system of congregations in Brazil

“A General Distinction Between Opinions and Desires”

“Considerations of the Spiritual Power”

• distinguished between the spiritual and the temporal

The Subjective Synthesis

• review of mathematics from a moralistic point of view
• intended to be a review of all seven sciences, but only mathematics was completed before his death

Paul DiMaggio

“The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields”

• with Walter Powell
• titled for Weber’s phrase “the iron cage”

Alan Dundes

Sacred Narrative

• argued that Joseph Campbell, “like most universalists [is] content to merely assert universality rather than bother to document it”

Emile Durkheim

He was a French sociologist in the Positivist tradition, a student of Auguste Comte. He founded the journal L’annee sociologique He wanted to make sociology its own superior field of independent study because he believed that societies cannot be reduced to component parts. He created the concept of “collective effervescence” which is communities coming together and sharing thoughts and actions.

He debated Jacques Doleris on sex education, drawing on his theory that incest taboos came from primitive beliefs about the power of menstrual blood.

A central concept of Emile Durkheim’s was anomie, which is a condition of social disintegration. Anomie is a state in which rules have lost authority and occurs when a society is in a state of drastic change; older societal norms fade and are not immediately replaced by new ones. In this state of normlessness, members of society are left confused and feeling outcast.

The Division of Labor in Society

• his doctoral dissertation, first major work
• explores the transition from primitive societies to industrial ones
  • the “dynamic density” of a group is the level of socialization within it
  • greater dynamic density is produced by an increase in population per area and degree of social interaction
  • greater dynamic density precipitates a move from organic solidarity to mechanical solidarity
• “primitive” homogenous societies exhibit “mechanical solidarity”
  • a cohesion between individuals based on their similarities, whether that be through kinship, familial ties, or religion
  • people socialize through, and social order is preseved by, homogeneity of lifestyle and work
• modern industrial societies exhibit “organic solidarity”
  • individuals are tied together by the interdependence caused by the division of labor
  • people socialize through and social order is preserved by workspaces
  • allows individualism to persist in complex societies
• distinguished between repressive law and restitutive law
  • in repressive law, crimes are punished by the communnity
  • in restitutive law, crimes are punished by the courts
  • used the Twelve Tables, the Hebrew Torah, and the laws of Christian Europe to argue that civilization’s laws have moved from being repressive to restitutive
• urbanization weakened the power of guilds and increased the geographic span of political and economic institutions
• the “collective conscience” is the mass of knowledge and beliefs of average members of a society
• crime
  • crime was a normal part of “primitive” society in which people share a collective conscience
  • crime offends the states of the collective conscience
  • the punishment of crime attempts to maintain mechanical solidarity
  • crime “is only an anticipation of future morality - a step torward what will be”

Rules of the Sociological Method

• stressed the importance of having a specific object of study
• the object of study for sociology is “social facts”
• social facts
  • either normal (observed in majority of individuals) or pathological (observed in minority of individuals)
  • states of the collective mind”
  • consist of “manners of acting, thinking, and feeling eternal to the individual”
  • certain actions, objects, and beliefs (external characteristics) that gain “facticity” and become coercive forces on individuals
  • imposed on an individual from an outside source rather than the individual’s own conscience
• emphasized that sociologists should “treat social facts as things”
• sociology must be brought into line as much as possible with the natural sciences by avoiding bias
• advocated a rigorously scientific approach

Suicide

• he studies suicide as a social fact
• helped standardize the sociological method
• observes that suicide is more prevalent among Protestants than Catholics and higher in peacetime than in wartime
• he divides the rationales for suicide into four categories
  • egoistic = individual does not feel fully integrated into society, “excessive individuation”
  • altruistic = individual’s needs are subordinated to the needs of society, normlessness
  • anomie = individual has a lack of certainty and a sense of moral confusion about one’s place in society
  • fatalistic = society is so excessively regulated that an individual would rather die than live in it
• other thinkers noticed a lack of the “question of art” in Suicide, which inspired Bataille and Derrida to note the “problem of the exxcess”
• concluded that Tarde’s law of imitation did not sufficiently explain suicide
• deviance is a natural part of any society

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

• explores religion sui generis, as a social phenomenon
• defines religion as beliefs and practices about the sacred, which creates a dichotomy of sacred and profane
• religion is the interrelation of sacred things
• uses the rituals and totemism of the Aborigine people of Australia as an example
• argues that religion developed from totemism when the items became sacred which then led to a conception of God
• in totemism, groups of people project the image of society on an object
• concluded that society annd the god that it worships are functionally equivalent
• defined God as “society writ large”
• distinguished between “beliefs”, states of opinions, and “rites”, determined modes of action
• theorizes that religion was a so-called “primordial matri” for culture, with collective representations
• beliefs should be evaluated according to the four criteria of volume, intensity, rigidity, and content
• examined the “collective effervescence” inherennt to communal behaviors that separated the sacred from everyday life
• identified the security of collective belief

On the Normality of Crime

• says Socrates’ independence of thought rendered a service to humanity
• tiny trangressions would amount to deviance in a “society of saints”
• crime is normal
• functionalist argument that crime must eist in order to strengthenn thical norms
• crime is a social fact

Who Wanted War?

• in collaboration with Ernest Denis
• analysis of the causes of World War I

Primitive Classification

• with Marcel Mauss
• described how the classification off things reflects social classifications

Germany Above All

• described the German mentality which led to World War I

For more information, see…

• Qwiz5 article on Durkheim
• ThoughtCo article on social deviance
• ThoughtCo article on Durkheim’s legacy on sociology
• Resilience Science article on critics of Durkhim
• Alt Shift X video on Durkheim’s mechanical and organical solidarity
• Crash Course Sociology video on Durkheim, suicide, and society
• Open Yale Courses’ Foundations of Modern Social Theory
  • lecture on Durkheim and Types of Social Solidarity
  • lecture on Durkheim’s Theory of Anomie
  • lecture on Durkheim on Suicide
  • lecture on Durkheim and Social Facts
• UvA Social Sciences video playlist on Durkheim

Norbert Elias

Drew on Marcel Mauss’s theory of the “technique of the body” to explain the concept of habitus

Dian Fossey

A primatologist

James George Frazer

1854-1941. A Scottish anthropologist who primarily studied mythology and comparative religion.

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

• “study in comparative religion” and mythology
• the golden bough
  • given by Proserpine to allow Aeneas to enter the underworld in the Aeneid
• analyzed a wide range of myths that center on the death and rebirth of a solar deity
• thesis: a marriage between a sun god and an earth goddess formed the basis for ancient resurrection-based fertility cults
• originally included crucifixion of Jesus as one among many of these myths
• tremendous impact on psychology and literature
• societies move through stages characterized by magic, religion, and science
• classified stories about the origin of death
• inspired by a ritual at the cult center of Nemi
• begins with chapter “The King of the Wood”
  • discussion of Diana and Verbius
• thirteenth section, on the “Transference of Ills”
  • discusses an Aborigine toothache cure
• sixteenth section
  • discusses an Aztec tradition in which a man was dressed as a god, worshipped for a year, and then eaten
• one chapter
  • to explain the role of the “public magician”,
  • uses the example of the island Ploska, on which a wizard is able to make rain by dipping the leaves of a certain tree in water
• somewhere
  • Rex Nemorensis, ritual in which the king’s successor ritually slays upon ascension
  • connected to the more general concept of a dying and returning king, labeled as the “King of the Wood” ceremony, which is present in both pagan mythology and Christian traditions

For more information, see…

• this Qwiz5 article on The Golden Bough
• this LearnReligions article on sympathetic magic
• this British Library article on The Golden Bough as a source for Eliot’s The Waste Land
• J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Golden Bough
• this Open University lecture video on the Temple of Diana at Nemi
• this Gifford Lectures biograpy of Frazer

Derek Freeman

The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead/“The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth”

• published five years after Mead’s death
• claims much of Coming of Age in Samoa was based on the made-up stories of two teenagers, who deceived Mead into believing they practiced casual premarital sex
• also challenged Mead’s explanation of how women would fake virginity to adhere to the taupo system
• critiqued Mead’s commitment to write “for the Bishop Museum” and Mead’s relationship with Dr. Charles Lane

For more information, see…

• this NYT obituary of Derek Freeman
• this documentary on the controversy between Freeman and Mead

Clifford James Geertz

1926-2006. A Princeton anthropologist, the pioneer of thick description and champion of symbolic anthropology. He was the teacher of Sherry Ortner.

Geertz argued that ethnolography must consist of both facts and commentary and analysis of aspects of culture.

In one work, Geertz notes that we have accepted seeing “native” people naked because their breasts have become as unhuman as a cow’s udders.

In an essay about “thick description”, Geertz borrows a term from Gilbert Ryle to say that thick description can distinguish the difference between a twitch and a wink.

The Interpretation of Cultures

• expounded his view on symbolic anthropology
• provided a definition of ethnography
• introduced “thick description”, Geertz’s method of analyzing behavior within its social context
• includes “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”
• section “Playing with Fire”
  • discusses a concept from Jeremy Bentham in which it is irrational for men to risk anything because the stakes are so high
• babies are not permitted to crawl since society fears any association with animality
• discusses a ritual in which a coconut is placed in a pail of water and sinks for a period of twenty-one seconds called the “tjeng”
• included an analysis of the reasoning behind the moral seriousness of sacred symbols

“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”

• analyzed “webs of significance” using the technique of “thick description”
• cockfighting is an illegal blood sport with a complex betting system and an umpire
• the men of the village identify with their participants in the cockfight, so cockfighting becomes a symbolic display of a certain kind of masculinity
• a ring of people forming a “superorganism” shout “pulisi, pulisi” after the police arrive to break it up
• included in The Interpretatios of Culture

“From the Native Point of View”

• discussed the problems of attempting to observe society without joining it

Negara

• about the “theater state” Negara of 19th-century Brazil
• discussed the development of the pre-colonial nation/culture based on rituals and symbolic displays, rather than conquest/tyranny/military might to guague power
• used research from Bali

Islam Observed

• compared the development of Islam in Morocco and Indonesia
• concluded that there were no significant changes over the last fifty years in the religious practices of Morocco and Indonesia
• “the problem is not one of constructing definitions of religion”

Local Knowledge

• collection
• divided into sections on political “Definition”, “Anatomy”, and “Statement”
• describes the “Myth of the Exemplary Center”

“The Way We Think Now: Torward an Ethnography of Modern Thought”

• attacked the idea that “while we, the civilized, sort matters out analytically… they, the savage, wander about in a hodgepodge of… mystical participations”

Agricultural Involution

• differentiated between swidden and sawah
• written during Geertz’s time on the Modjokuto Project

“Religion as a Cultural System”

• distinguished between symbols that are “models of” the world and “models for” the world
• argued for adopting the “culture dimension of religious analysis” of Parsons and Shils while analyzing religion
• quotes the lines “One cannot bear to join in the madness / But if he does not do so / He will not share in the spoils” from a famous tembang to illustrate the discrepancy between moral prescriptions and material rewards.

For more information, see…

• this Institute for Advanced Study past faculty biography

Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt’s idea of a “Renaissance of culture” was developed after he read one of Geertz’s works.

Jane Goodall

1934-present. British primatologist/anthropologist who worked with chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She was mentored by and worked with Louis Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, along with Birute Galdikas and Dian Fossey as a trio of pioneering female scientists.

Goodall discovered cannibalistic infanticide and the hunting of colobus monkeys amongst a group of subjects called “innocent killers”.

Goodall described a war that broke out after the Kahama community splintered out from Kasakela.

In the Shadow of Man

• chimpanzees can use tools, insert stalks of grass into termite holes to “fish” for termites
  • proved that non-human animals could use tools

For more information, see…

• this biography of Goodall on her website

Jurgen Habermas

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

• discusses the emergence of the modern social welfare state
• about the growth of a “literary” public sphere out of the “bourgeiois” public sphere

The Theory of Communicative Action

• the goal of communicative action is mutual understanding
• challenged Max Weber’s definition of rationalization
• defines aesthetic, therapeutic, and explicative discourse

Knowledge and Human Interest

• claimed Freud’s “scientific misunderstanding” tried to free humans from the causality of the natural world

Legitimation Crisis

• the elite keep power in capitalism by providing the public with “goodies”

Marvin Harris

American anthropologist.

Harris claimed that Franz Boas practiced “historical particularism” in opposition to contemporary theories of cultural evolution.

The Sacred Cow and the Abominal Pig

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

• applied his theory of cultural materialism
• claimed that Middle Eastern pork taboos were a result of environmental factors, not cultural differences
• examines why the Catholic Church changed its position on whether people fly on broomsticks
• preface says “Explanations of lifestyle are like potato chips. People insist on eating them until the whole bag is gone”

Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures

• chapter “The Industrial Bubble”
  • claims that circa 1770, the rise in child labor reduced the use of foundling hospitals for state-sponsored infanticide.

The Rise of Anthropological Theory

• generalized Kenneth Pike’s etic/emic paradigm to non-linguistic anthropology

Thor Heyerdahl

1914-2002. He demonstrated the possibility that ancient people could have migrated around the globe using only primitive rafts.

Heyerdahl was accused of racism after he visited the rock carvings at the Azerbaijani site of Gobustan and concluded that the Aesir originated from there.

Heyerdahl’s discovery of pollen samples near crater lakes lent credence to the three-epoch model of the history of Easter Island, which he suggested was the original island to bear the name “rapa”.

Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific Ocean from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands on a balsa-wood raft, the Kontiki (named after the Incan sun god Kon-Tiki Viracocha). He sought to prove plausible contact between South America and Polynesia. He directed an Academy Award-winning documentary based on this feat.

The Ra Expeditions

• documents the success of a papyrus boat, Ra II, which was able to sail across the Atlantic
• (Ra I failed)

For more information, see…

• The Kon-Tiki Museum’s biography of Heyerdahl

Lewis Hyde

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

• titled after Mauss’s The Gift
• discusses the way that artis subsumed by a market

Steven Kahlberg

Agued that Max Weber actually had four definitions of one key concept.

Jomo Kenyatta

The first president of Kenya, he was advised by Bronislaw Malinowski. He abandoned his Christian name, “Johnstone”, after publishing Facing Mount Kenya.

Kenyatta was expelled from the local Church of Scotland by Jon Arthur for alleged dishonest while talking about “irau” among the Kikuyu.

Kenyatta demanded but never received a co-authorship for a Lilias Armstrong phonetics book based on his voice recordings.

Facing Mount Kenya

• introduction written by Bronislaw Malinowski
• cover is Kenyatta holding a spear whiled dressed in skin
• ethnography of the Kikuyu
• defended traditional circumcision rites for men and women

Charle King

Gods of the Upper Air

• opens with a description of Margaret Mead on the Sonoma steamship

James Laidlaw

Criticized Mauss’s The Gift using the example of a Jainist religious practice.

Edmund Leach

Leach was taught by Bronislaw Malinowski.

Leach wrote a popular introduction to Claude Levi-Strauss.

In the 1976 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture Series in Social Anthropology, Learch criticized Radcliffe-Brown’s attempts to construct a “natural science of society”, and suggested that a seashell metaphor used by Radcliffe-Brown in correspondance with a colleague was taken from D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form.

Political systems of highland Burma

Claude Levi-Strauss

1908-2009. A French anthropologist, the pioneer of structural anthropology. He was the chair of social anthropology at the College de France 1959-1982. He was married to the anthropologist Dina Dreyfus, whose eye infection ended her time studying the Nambikwara with him. He is most famous for examining various myth systems and claiming certain mythemes are universal among humans.

Levi-Strauss popularized the term for a concrete unit of a myth, a mytheme, as part of his theory that myths share common, universal traits.

Levi-Strauss’s theory of mythology is summarized in the statement that “myth is language”.

In an introduction to Marcel Mauss, Levi-Strauss attacked Mauss’s use of “mana” as “void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning” in a passage coining “floating signifier”.

Levi-Strauss described a “house society” as a society in which kinship depended on “a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth”.

Levi-Strauss began a work by discussing the story of “The Macaws and Their Nest”, a study of the transformation of South American folk tales.

Levi-Strauss created a binary distinction that differentiates objects based on the degree of socialization they have experienced from their natural state.

The Savage Mind

• first chapter “The Science of the Concrete”
  • analyzes a portrait by François Clout and outlines “plastic”, “primitive”, and “applied” modes of art
• bricoleurs vs engineers
  • bricoleurs are bound by the materials they have and have the “savage mind”
  • the more scientific engineers have the “true scientific mind”
• mythology is a bricolage, creating using “whatever is at hand” rather than engineered
• suggested totemism is meaningless, comparing it to hysteria
• theory of why trickster gods are represented by ravens and coyotes
• traced the origin of a myth from South America to the Arctic
• studied Aboriginal tribes

“The Elementary Structures of Kinship”

• 1930s fieldwork with the Nambikwara people of Brazil
• exchange is the universal basis for kinship
• opposed Radcliffe-Brown by putting forward alliance theory
  • conjectured that marriage between groups was a means to increase social ties with outside groups
• put forth two models of marriage exchange

Tristes Tropiques

• memoir like
• documents his escape from his home country, and work with his wife among the Namibkwara and Bororo of Brazil
• described his “three mistresses” as being geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism
• tested his ability to extemporize on a theme by describing a sunset
• “I hate traveling and travelers”

Mythologiques

• Tetralogy about world mythology
• The Raw and the Cooked
  • analyzes the myths of the Bororo people of Brazil at the beginning
  • heating food marks the transition from savagery to civiliasion
• The Origins of Table Manners

Structural Anthropology

• applied the structuralist methods of linguist Ferdinand te Saussure to anthropology
• studied cultures as sets of binary oppositions

“The Structural Study of Myth”

• attacks formalist approaches of studying myth
• criticizes Vladimir Propp
  • Propp considered myths and folktales to be in the same species and genus in his folktale classification system
  • Propp focused on the individual folktale
• criticized the classification system as vague and lacking and contexxt
• argued that the fundamental units of narrative are mythemes, not folktales
• ends with proposing that “languages exist in which an entire myth can be expressed in a single word”

Myth and Meaning

• says the bridge between science and myth is shrinking
• compares myth to music in that it must be understood as a continuous sequence
• examines the correlation between cold weather and myths related to twins and people with harelips
• compared the usage of a skate fighting the South Wind in myth to modern binary processes in computers that simply evaluate to “yes” or “no”

The Way of the Masks

• compares how various groups in British Columbia related to the Swaihwe mask

The Jealous Potter

• discussed the Jivaro
• referred to those living on Bansk Islands when discussing the “illusion” of the jealous potter

Niklas Luhman

Extended Parsons’ analysis of the problem of “double contingency”, in which communication cannot occur between two people when they will both base their behavior on the other

Bronislaw Malinowski

1884-1942. A Polish functionalist anthropologist who studied at the London School of Economics. He published several works while in exile in Papau New Guinea. He advised John Kenyatta and taught Edmund Leach. Contra Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski’s work focused on culture and society meeting the needs of indivudals; societies did not just provide “individual” needs like food, but also had to provide for “instrumental” and “integrative” needs. He founded biocultural functionalism.

In one work, Malinowski claims that social rituals hold a straightforward biological purpose. That conception of functionalism was refuted by Radcliffe Brown.

Malinowski argued that charters, personnel, and norms were three of the six reuirements for the establishment of any institution.

Malinowski, in one passage, claimed his final goal was to “grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of the world”, to find out “the hold life has on him”.

Argonauts of the Western Pacific

• discusses canoe building and launching
• about the inhabitants of the Kiriwna islands
• delineated the “kula ring”
  • gift economy based on the exchange of necklaces and bracelets in the Trobriand Islands
  • veigun/souvala, red shell necklaces, are traded clockwise to the north and mwali, white shell bracelets, are traded counter-clockwise to the south
  • hypothesized the “opposite flow” rule
  • interpreted the kula ring as gimwali (barter) functioning as reciprocal exchange between indiviiduals
• “The Departure of an Overseas Expedition”

Coral Gardens and their Magic

• use of magic in agriculture, especially in the Trobriand Islands
• various rituals designed to bring rain and ensure fertility among coral gardens
• taro, bananas, and palm were cultivated with the assistance of gardening spells (“verbal acts”)
• used the example of incantations against waves only being recited in the deep ocean and not while fishing in lagoons as evidence for the psychological value of superstition

Sex and Repression in Savage Societies

• contra Freud
  • Oedipus complex/psychosexual development is not a universal element of human culture
  • limited to Western societies
• written using fieldwork in northeast/northwest Melanesia

A Scientific Theory of Culture

• listed basic human needs and institution types
• differentiates between basic biological and cultural needs

A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

• controversial collection of writings
• chronicled his time in New Guinea and Melanesia
• introduction written by Raymond Firth

For more information, see…

• this AnthroBase biography of Malinowski

Geoffrey MacCormack

Criticized Marcel Mauss for his imprecision in conflating the “personality” of an object with a Maori term called the “hau”.

Maureen Malloy

Argued that Margaret Mead’s studies helped form a “usable culture” for Americans because they were actually about personifications of American identity problems

Marcel Mauss

A French sociologist, a nephew of Emile Durkheim.

Mauss described “body techniques”, non-discursive actions which are “effective and traditional”, including hand gestures, walking, and the position of the hands at rest, which completely embody objects of culture.

The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies

• gifts are infused completely with the identity of their original owners, meaning gifts cannot be totally alienated from the givers -> total prestration
• “total prestration”/“total phenomenon”/“total social fact”
  • woven into the social and cultural fabric of a society
  • a concept is imbued with “spiritual mechanisms”, the most notable of which is reciprocity
  • gifts embody total prestation, preventing gifts from being free from the expectation of reciprocity
• compares the potlatch (Kwakiutl) and kula ring (Trobriand islanders, from Malinowski fieldwork)
• examines the effects of formalized exchange systems on society
• discussed the Polynesian concept of mana
• introduction by Claude Levi-Strauss
  • notes that Mauss probably misunderstood the hau system among the Māori

Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice

• with Henri Hubert, a friend and authority on Celci Culture
• sacrifice has an entry, middle, and exit seciton that brings the sacred and profane worlds together
• outlines a “scheme” which varies with general and specific functions

“On Prayer”

• unfinished, with WSF Pickering
• rites tend to regress while prayers stay constant as a religion develops

Margaret Mead

1884-1942. An anthropologist and student of Franz Boas. She was married to anthropologist Gregory Bateson and was the mother of Mary Catherine Bateson. They co-wrote Balinese Character, a photographic study of life in Bali. She met her second husband, Reo Fortune, while coming back from writing Coming of Age in Samoa. She was known for a signature cape and walking stick.

Mead got the American Jewish Committee to study shtetls by interviewing immigrants in New York City.

During World War II, Mead lead the Committee on Food Habits at the National Research Council.

Mead gave a conference address entitled “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics” that helped pioneer the field of second-order cybernetics.

In one work, Mead examined the importance of “Sir Ghosts” to one society.

In one work, Mead introduces the idea of “postfigurative, cofigurative and prefigurative” societies.

Coming of Age in Samoa

• interviewed 68 young girls (ages 9-20) on the Samoan island of Ta’u/Manu’a archipelago
  • many later admitted to lying to her
• concluded that adolescence was less stressful in Samoan society because there are more liberal mores about premarital sex and girls had more access to the adult world
• describes the taupou system of institutionalized virginity among high-ranking women, and how most women would fake virginity
• described a day opening with lovers returning from “trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes”
• two types of marriage, the lower of which involved private elopement and was called avaga
• ended with a call for Americans to “permit their children to see adult human bodies” like the children of Ta’u
• may have became a bestseller due to the topless girl on the dust jacket
• described how children gare given prominence over matai in informal dance ceremonies
• shocked American audiences with descriptions of “clandestine sex adventures” and adolescence being the best part of a Samoan girl’s life
• chapter “Education for Choice”
  • discussion of how to improve the American education system

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies

• three tribes in New Guinea
  • Arapesh
    • mountain-dwelling
    • patriarchal
  • Mundugumor/Biwat
    • river-dwelling
    • aggressive
  • Tchambuli
    • lake-dwelling
    • semi-matriarchal
    • women were dominant and men were more emotional
    • described how the men “primped” themselves while the women worked
    • argued that the work of travelling to trade fish indicated the dynamics of power
      • disputed in 983 by Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington’s fieldwork

Growing Up in New Guinea

A Rap on Race

• a transcription of a series of taped conservations she had with writer James Baldwin about racial issues
• theorized that white and Black people in the South defined themselves as opposites

Male and Female

• about gender roles, pretty obviously

Blackberry Winter

• her autobiography
• takes its name from a regional expression for a late cold spell that ruins a blackberry crop

And Keep Your Powder Dry

• pro-British
• analyzed American culture
• asked “are democracy and social science compatible each with each?” and “are today’s youth different?” in two chapters

Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority

• controversially built on Geoffrey Gorer’s “swaddle thesis” about Russian power
• published by RAND

Themes in French Culture

• with Rhoda Metraux
• a study of the foyer, a relationship model in French society

Male and Female

• a study of gender differences among pacific islanders’

For more information, see…

• this Qwiz5 article on Mead
• this Britannica biography of Mead
• this Atlantic article on the female students of Boas, including Mead
• this Library of Congress collection of the writings and photographs of Mead
• this NYT obituary of Derek Freeman, a critic of Mead
• this documentary on the controversy between Freeman and Mead

Robert Merton

Merton’s thesis on the origin of experimental science was inspired by Weber’s work.

Wilbert Moore

Along with Kingsley Davis, both students of Talcott Parsons, created the theory of role allocation by expanding Parsons’ education theories about people finding the appropriate job in society.

Lewis Henry Morgan

Ancient Society

Martin Orans

Not Even Wrong

• defended Margaret Mead’s ability to identify jokes

Sherry Ortner

A student of Clifford Geertz. She studied the Nepalise sherpa, analyzing “serious games” as part of her practice theory.

Talcott Parsons

A Harvard structuralist-functionalist/symbolic-interactionist sociologist. A disciple of Max Weber. He poorly translated Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for the first time into English. He was a doctoral advisor for Harold Garfinkel and Gliffort Geertz at Harvard. He tought Wilbert Moore and Kingsley Davis.

Parsons’ “cybernetic hierarchy” has energy flowing up and control flowing down.

Parsons described cognitive, evaluative, and cathectic elements of motivational orientation.

Parsons developed a theory of interaction between ego and alter, in which the problem of “double contingency”, where communication cannot occur between two people when they will both base their behavior on the other, leads to the necessity of stability.

Parsons denied that American exceptionalism was the nature of things, but defined it as a historical process.

In one work, Parsons described American exceptionalism’s impact on victory in World War II.

Parsons’ educational theories emphasized people finding their appropriate occupatin in society.

During World War II, Parsons wrote a series of important monographs on the sociology of Nazism, arguing that they sought to overthrow the enlightenment.

Parsons’ doctorate examined the concept of capitalism in German scholarship.

The Structure of Social Action

• introduced social action theory
• reformulated Max Weber’s distinction between “means-end rational” and “value-rational” actions into a voluntaristic system
• formulated the “unit act”
• chapter 10
  • explication of the nature of illness
  • one of the founding texts of medical sociology

The Social System

• sought to integrate sociology with all of the other social sciences
• heavily borrowed from Enrst Mayr’s descriptions of “teleonomic processes”
• introduced the AGIL paradigm
  • systems must fulfill adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency
  • described “allocative” and “coordinative” decisions corresponding to different “subsectors” as methods of goal attainment
• developed the theory of “pattern variables”
  • social choices are made using five axes, including the range between affective neutrality and affectivity (gratification of emotions), and ascription (action in the correct context) and achievement (advancement per se)

Christopher Pollitt

Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis: New Public Management, Governance, and the Neo-Weberian State

• with Geert Bouckaert
• defined the Neo-Weberian State as reflected by European “modernizers” as opposed to “maintainers” or “marketers”

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

1881-1955. A British anthropologist, the founder of structural functionalism. Structural funcionalism focuses on identifying the groups within a society and the rules and customs that define the relationships between people. He did fieldwork in the Andaman Islands and Western Australia, where he studied the social organization of Australian tribes. He taught at the University of Chicago, where he trained Fred Eggan, William Warner, and the excellently-named Sol Tax. He founded the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford, where he was succeeded by Evans-Pritchard.

Radcliffe-Brown engaged in a notable 1937 debate with Mortimer Adler over the “natural science of society” like at the University of Chicago.

The Andaman Islanders

• relied on Durkheim in arguing that the purpose of things like the “Religious and Magical Beliefs” and “Myths and Legends” of the Andaman islanders was the maintenance of “social cohesion”
• distinguished groups like the Jarawa and the Sentinelese living on the Andaman islands in the Indian Ocean

Structure and Function in Primitive Society

• first part “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa”
  • discussed how “the mother’s brother” is not the same as other uncles
  • argued that fraternal equivalence was the most common classification principle adopted in primitive society
• “The Sociological Theory of Totemism”

“The Social Organization of Australian Tribes”

• claimed to have discovered the Kariera kinship system

For more information, see…

• this Australain Dictionary of Biography article on Radcliffe-Brown

Paul Ricoeur

The Conflict of Interpretations

• critiques Claude Levi-Strauss, discussing his concepts of diachrony and syncrhony

Freud and Philosophy

• calls Freud a “master of suspicion”, along with Marx and Nietzsche

George Ritzer

Expanded on Max Weber’s work to coin “McDonaldization”, the pocess through which a society becomes structured like a fast-food restaurant.

Edward Said

A Columbia University Palestinian-American professor of anthropology.

A polemic by Said elicited the sarcastic response “The time has come to save Greece from the classicists” from Bernard Lewis.

Said drew on R. W. Southern and Norman Daniel to argue that fictions have “their own dialectic of growth or decline” since misconceptions can be self-sufficient.

Orientalism

• 1973
• defined orientalism as an imaginative geography dividing the world in two
• claimed that since Antiquity, the West has defined itself by “othering” Asia and the Islamic world
• interprets W. B. Yeats’ poetry as a project analogous to those of Lepold Senghor and Aime Cesaire

Culture and Imperialism

• cited references to Thomas Bertram’s plantation on Antigua to link Mansfield Park to imperialist expansion

Beginnings

• interpreted anxieties around procreation in texts like The Waste Land to argue that modernism represented a transition from “filiation” to “affiliation”

The World, the Text, and the Critic

• praises Erich Auerbach as the exemplary “secular critic”
• playing on the different meanings of the word “canon”, Said called for a “contrapuntal” reading of the “cultural archive” to counter the “politics of blame”

Alan Sica

Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order

• argued that Weber’s inability to comprehend why peasants opposed beneficial reforms by the Junkers drove many of Weber’s early works

Werner Sombart

Challenged Max Weber for characterizing Jews as a “pariah-people” whose business was limited to trade

Leo Strauss

Accused Max Weber for claiming that “the individual has to decide which is God for him and which is the devil”

Max Weber

German sociologist. A Benjamin Franklin enthusiast.

Weber claimed that sociology should concern itself with the “interpretive understanding of social action” and asserted that his thought was based on hypothetical “ideal types”

In his “life chances” hypothesis, Weber posited that people’s ability to improve their lives depends on the resources available to them.

Weber argued that the distribution of “religious benefits” was a counterweight to political power caused by “hierocracies”

In one article, Weber denied the existence of true objective scientific analysis of culture

Weber argued that “polytheism of values” forced empirical academic research to be “value-free”

Weber defined modernity as “rationalization” and “disenchantment”

Weber distinguished between actions whose methods were rational (procedural or means-end rationality) and actions whose ends were rational (value-oriented rationality)

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

• studied the effect of Calvinism/Lutheran secularism on the development of capitalism
• quoted Ben Franklin’s belief that time is money
• predestination turned the church from an enemy into an ally of capitalism
• identified the “theodicy of fortune and misfortune as a driving force behind different religious outlooks on economic status
• claimed that “the calling” is now universal in market economies after the loss of the Calvinist religious impulse leading to the emergence of market economies
• chapter “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism”
  • chides Richard Baxter’s claim that his ideals were “a light cloak” since in fact they became “a shell as hard as steel” in the “iron cage”
  • prophesied that an ascetic order may determine the lives of men until “the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt”

Politics as a Vocation

• lecture/essay
• defined the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force
• noted the historical transtion away from those who execute the laws owning the means of executing the laws
• politicians must balance their “ethic of moral conviction” with their “ethic of responsibility”
• contrasted patrimonial and modern forms of staffing
• demeaned bureaucrats as unfit to be leaders
• the “ideal type” of “modern officialdom” as “formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view”, which he distinguished based upon their levels of abstraction
• traditional vs rational-legal vs charismatic authority
  • traditional authority
    • domination by the “authority of the eternal yesterday”
    • derives legitmacy from its longevity
  • charismatic authority
    • domination by the “gift of grace”
  • rational-legal authority
    • domination by “legality”
    • forms the basis of the bureaucracy that leads to an “iron cage” of rationalization, imposed through disenchantment after devaluation of mysticism
    • people in Western societies are trapped in systems based on efficiency and rationality
• ended by quoting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 102, grimly predicting that “no summer’s bloom lies ahead of us”, instead a “polar night of icy darkness” awaits us

“Class, Status, and Party”

• social stratification is a function of class, status, and party
• class is crystallized market position, status is crystallized “social honor”, and party is crystallized political power
• defines class as a group sharing “a specific causal component of their life chances”
• defines “stand”/“status” as sharing an esteemed “style of life”
• differentiated lifestyle-based status groups who depend on honor from classes

Weber in the following unfinished series, compared the social effects of “exemplary prophets” (like Buddha) to those of “messianic prophets” (like Muhammad).

Economy and Society

• outline the development of institutions that “dominate through knowledge”
• detailed three ideas on religious behavior, which he termed world-flying mysticism, world-rejecting asceticcism, and inner-worldly asceticism

The Religion of India

• how the Indian caste system prevented the creation of an urban elite
• claimed that the lack of messsianic prophecy in Hinduism led to a lack of incentive to innovate

The Religion of China

• controversially claimed that Confucianism was free of prophecy

Ancient Judaism

• about messianic Judaism

“Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions”

• proposes a four-type typology of world-rejection, including mysticism and asceticism

Annette Weiner

Inalienable Possessions

• borrowed Mauss’s classifications of goods in the analysis employed
• inalienable possessions originates with Mausss’s descriptions of “pieces of property” as sacra