Introductory Chapter: The Many Lives of Anthropology

1. Introduction

“It would be difficult to find ten anthropologists, who would agree on what anthropology is on close definition,” uttered E. L. Hewitt in 1907, according to Juul Dieserud writing the following year ([1], p. 11). At that time, the field of anthropology was still quite young: according to Dieserud, in 1908 anthropology was just recently “well out of its teens,” with “certain parts of its vast boundary… still only dimly defined” (p. 2).

For the present volume, which is conceived as a retrospective and prospective on, a celebration and critique of, the discipline of anthropology, Howell’s and Dieserud’s diagnosis is an interesting provocation and opportunity. Accordingly, this introductory chapter seizes the occasion to survey the territory that anthropology has trod not only during the past century since Malinowski and Boas established it firmly as an ethnographic science but from the earliest stirrings of what we could call the ethnographic impulse, the desire to describe—and more than describe, but to explain and understand—the nature of humanity through its diversity. The history of anthropology has, of course, become something of an industry, embodied best in the works of George Stocking, but there is abundant if not endless—and contentious—material for pondering the origins and evolution of the field, which is an apt undertaking for the book you are about to read. What we will find is many incarnations, in the past and the present alike, of anthropology—that it has lived many lives and displayed as much diversity as the humankind that it aspires to know.

2. Anthropology and the ethnographic impulse before 1800

In the same year that Dieserud wrote, the illustrious James George Frazer mused that, “Strange as it may seem, in the large and thriving family of the sciences, Anthropology, or the Science of Man, is the latest born” ([2], p. 3). This is not to say that a curiosity about fellow humans was totally lacking, although certainly any systematic study of humanity in its immense variety, especially a science of the present-day sort, was very late arriving. It is customary, in fact, to start the anthropological clock with Herodotus, the ancient Greek author of Histories around 450 BCE, whom Margaret Hodgen called “the first authoritative Greek ethnologist” ([3], p. 30). Not only did he describe more than two dozen peoples encountered during his travels, but according to Hodgen he did so from a distinctly objective and comparative perspective based on surprisingly familiar analytical categories such as “marriage customs, religious rites, burial practices, and food habits” (23). While by no means an exhaustive catalog of cultural topics, this list does indicate a sensibility toward standardized comparable classes of information.

There is some disagreement about what became of the spirit of ethnographic inquiry in the two millennia between Herodotus and the European Enlightenment. Hodgen, like most scholars, was pessimistic about ethnographic records from the Hellenistic, Roman, and medieval eras; in her estimation, writings from this long, dark period were burdened by repetition of the legendary and imaginative (if not nonsensical), obsession with the bizarre and exceptional, and, after the triumph of Christianity, conformity to dogma. Moreover, in a tendency that far outlived the ancient and medieval world, discussion of human diversity was typically bundled into the subject of “natural history,” as in Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis composed around 77 CE and jumbling anthropological observations with geography, zoology, and other subjects. It was only through the auspices of long-distance travel related to trade and commerce, proselytization and pilgrimage, and war that accurate and trustworthy (we could say, practical) accounts began to appear, as in Carpini’s 1240s Historia Mongolorum and the chronicles of Marco Polo. Indeed, Hodgen asserted that Carpini organized his researches under four relatively modern headings, namely, bodily forms and living habits, manners, laws and customs, and religious or “superstitious” traditions ([3], p. 91). On the other hand, Fazioli [4] and Khanmohamadi [5] are adamant that the Middle Ages were not dark and sterile centuries for ethnographic inquiry, on the grounds of a few key figures like William of Rubruck, Gerald of Wales, and John Mandeville.

Whatever the case, the term “anthropology” is usually considered a neologism coined in 1501 by Magnus Hundt in his Anthropologium de hominis dignitate (Anthropology of Humanity’s Dignity), which inaugurated the tradition of attending to humankind’s dual-but-integrated nature as a physical and a spiritual (we would more likely say today, psychological or social) being. The term was adopted three decades later by Galeazzo Capra in his 1533 Anthropologia [6]. According to Haddon in his 1910 history of anthropology, it was another century before the word entered English via the anonymous 1655 Anthropologic Abstracted; or, The idea of Humane nature reflected in briefe Philosophicall and anatomical collections, which defined it as “the history of human nature” again in terms of the body or anatomy and the psychology or “rational soul” of humankind ([7], pp. 6–7).

Santing concluded that the “science of man” that was forming by the 1600s was a mélange of various and often incompatible genres, including “Bible studies, philosophical dignity literature, the study of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, but also anatomical, physiological, and psychological investigations” ([6], p. 481). The anatomical/physiological side rose to the fore in the 1700s as the basis for typologies and theories of human difference, exemplified by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 1775 thesis On the Natural Variety of Mankind, which grouped human populations into five races (but happily one species)—Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. After logging the physical differences in fair detail, he attributed many of them to the effect of climate on the body, as well as to migration. Yet he made the very modern observation that humans are “destitute” in instincts, which opened a space for learning and what we would come to label as culture.

Around the same time, Johann Herder sliced humanity alternatively not as races but as nations or folks, each with its own special natural qualities or genius, its unique national soul, Nationalgeist, Geist der Nation, Geist des Volks, or Seele des Volks. As a natural subdivision of the species, each nation/folk was the bearer of distinctive customs or lifeways, expressed in its language, arts, folklore, and so forth. These customs or lifeways (again, in the modern vernacular, culture) were legitimate objects of investigation and preservation, and by implication not only European folks but non-European and non-Western folks possessed them. Hence, as Stocking reminded us, academic interest in the vanishing or forgotten heritage of rural (and presumably pre-modern) populations started to flourish, including practices of going into communities to collect this local knowledge [8].

3. The crystallization of anthropologies in the 1800s

The predominance of physical or racial hypotheses in the nineteenth-century history of anthropology, stemming from earlier habits of thought and exacerbated by colonialism and imperialism, has been well recognized. Less appreciated, Stocking contended, is the fact that pre-1800s scientists of humanity “did not conceptualize human diversity in rigidly hereditarian or strictly physical terms” ([8], p. 18). Moreover, the concept of “race” itself only gradually acquired “a clearly biological meaning” in the mid-1800s, as the term continued to be applied not just to the Caucasian race and the African race, etc. but to the English race, the German race, the Irish race, and others; consequently, the nineteenth-century science of man still evinced “a confusion of physical and cultural characteristics” (p. 63), often on the reasoning that the former caused the latter.

The other key piece of the coalescing field of anthropology was progress, the idea that contemporary “civilization” (that is, European society and culture) was the product of “the development of human ideas and institutions from some primitive or ‘natural’ state,” represented by non-European peoples who, for some reason, remained at one of these more primitive states (p. 19). Hence the interpretation of the anthropological project as history or natural history. A precocious example was J. C. Prichard’s 1808 De generis humani varietate (On the Diversity of the Human Race), which he followed with his 1843 The Natural History of Man. In between, William Lawrence likewise published his 1819 Lectures on the Natural History of Man; shortly after Prichard’s second book, Robert Gordon Latham added his 1850 Natural History of the Varieties of Man.

The most famous and influential instance of speculative human social history was, of course, Morgan’s 1877 Ancient History, which organized the ladder of progress into three major stages—savagery, barbarism, and civilization. More narrow or specialized studies focused on one particular social institution, like Maine’s 1861 Ancient Law and 1883 On Early Law and Custom; Bachofen’s 1861 Mother Right, McLennan’s 1865 Primitive Marriage, and Morgan’s 1871 Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family; and Robertson Smith’s 1889 Religion of the Semites and Frazer’s 1890 The Golden Bough.

While these sweeping natural-social histories were usually oversimplified and frequently fanciful, and while they tended to lean on classical Western sources rather than non-Western ethnographic ones, they did illustrate an important ascending consciousness of comparison, already detected in von Humboldt’s 1797 Plan einer vergleichenden Anthropologie (Outline of a Comparative Anthropology). What was lacking was empirical knowledge of the alleged living representatives of those earlier states of humanity, or as von Humboldt complained, “What we need most right now is an individualizing knowledge of human beings” ([9], p. xii). In response, an overlapping—or parallel, or identical—enterprise of ethnology began to take shape. According to Stocking, in England by mid-century, ethnology was understood as “the most general scientific framework for the study of the linguistic, physical, and cultural characteristics of dark-skinned, non-European, ‘uncivilized’ peoples” ([8], p. 47), precisely the populations most needed to complete the anthropology-as-natural-history project. (Lest one think that we have spoken too incautiously about the relationship between anthropology and ethnology, Haddon wrote in his aforementioned history that “‘Ethnology’ is a term which is often loosely used as synonymous with ‘Anthropology,’ to cover the whole field of the science of man” ([7], p. 99)).

Since ethnology, or anthropology construed as ethnology, was seen (then and for decades to come) as an appendage of sociology—essentially the sociology of “primitive” or non-Western peoples—it was (then and for decades to come) “viewed as a science of leftovers or residues…a fusion of diverse styles of inquiry, derived from the natural historical, the moral philosophical, and the humanistic traditions—in relation to a particular subject matter that was being excluded from other emerging human sciences”; ultimately, “ethnology was the science of savages in the sense that it was the only scholarly discourse that took them seriously as subject matter” ([8], p. 48).

Given this task, and receiving the popular conceptions and scholarly tendencies of the day, it is no surprise that anthropology/ethnology would persist, as in Pliny’s time, as a jumble of biological/racial, cultural/civilizational, psychological, and often moral discourses and practices. On the subject of psychology, Buschmann stressed that thinkers like Bastian, creator of the notions of Elementargedanken (elementary/universal ideas/thoughts) and Völkergedanken (folk/local ideas/thoughts), held that “ethnology was above all a psychological endeavor… Ethnology became, in his view, an ethnopsychology (Völkerpsychologie)” ([10], p. 18). However it was conceived—as psychology, race, institutional history, or whatever—Buschmann reckoned that anthropology/ethnology underwent a shift “from globalism to localism,” or we could say from grand conjectural typologies and histories to descriptive particularism, which “preferred small inquiries within clearly delineated areas” (p. 2). An interesting early attempt at this approach was Latham’s 1859 Descriptive Ethnology, the first volume of which, concentrating on eastern and northern Asia and parts of Europe, contained short profiles of multiple societies and culture areas, each illustrating the familiar ersatz of geographical, racial, and social-cultural.

This transformation was gradual and never absolute, but it did further accelerate the multiplication of views of precisely what anthropology was. One of the best surveys of this terrain, written at a time especially close to the events, is Dieserud’s tragically neglected 1908 synopsis of “the scope and content” of late 1800s/very early 1900s anthropology [1]. The book must be read to feel the full impact, but some excerpts provide a taste of the dazzling disagreement about what exactly anthropology was and how it should be organized or subdivided.

• Topinard 1885: two branches, one for racial variation (anthropology), the other for variation of “peoples” (ethnology); later dubbed “anthropology proper” as the science of human biology versus “ethnical anthropology” as the study of culture and custom, further divided into ethnology and sociology

• Hovelacque and Herve 1887: four branches—zoological anthropology, ethnical anthropology (comparative racial anatomy and physiology), prehistoric anthropology, and ethnography (description and classification of existing peoples/races)

• Brinton 1892: somatology or physical anthropology, ethnology or historic and analytic anthropology, ethnography or geographic and descriptive anthropology, and archaeology

• Powell 1892 and 1900: somatology, psychology, and ethnology (including archaeology)

• Haddon 1898: ethnography as the “description of a special people” like a tribe or nation as well as the classification of such groups; ethnology includes subtopics of sociology, technology, religion, and language

• Banhson 1900: anthropology and ethnography as distinct sciences, the former discussing natural history and the latter committed to cultural history

And so forth. In his own classification outline that fills much of the book, Dieserud broke anthropology down into general (basically physical) anthropology on the one hand, including zoological anthropology, paleoanthropology, “racial psychology,” and “systematic or taxonomic” anthropology, and ethnical anthropology, encompassing folk psychology, ethnology or “culture anthropology” (a term he attributes to Holmes in 1903), archaeology also known as paleoethnology, anthropogeography, and ethnography. His category “ethnic sociology” circumscribed most of the terrain of contemporary cultural anthropology, from kinship and government to arts, language, material culture, religion and mythology, morals, and folklore.

4. Twentieth-century proliferations of anthropology

In its ambition to be a comprehensive science of humanity, nineteenth-century anthropology was unavoidably a dual (even a muddled) science of biology and culture, with arguably biology in the forefront, under the influence of characters like anatomist Paul Broca in France. E. B. Tylor is the transitional figure, whose 1871 Primitive Culture obviously privileged culture and provided the seminal opening definition as the complex whole that is learned and shared in a society. Still, the book followed the tradition of decontextualized comparison and “thin description,” and his subsequent 1881 Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization conventionally commenced with prehistory, anatomy and physiology, and race classification before diving into cultural subjects such as language, tools, economics, religion, and “society” which covered kinship, property, law and government, rank and class, and war. So, it was well established that anthropology was going to be a broad undertaking, eventually evolving into the familiar “four fields” of physical/biological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology plus archaeology accepted by most if not all anthropologists today.

What was still lacking in turn-of-the-century anthropology, despite enhanced awareness of the cultural or “ethnical” side of the discipline, was what Geertz would later memorably call “thick description” of particular societies and cultures. In other words, anthropology was not yet a fully ethnographic science in the modern sense. This is not to say that there were no ethnographic case studies of particular groups or peoples; there were, of course, including Boas’ 1888 The Central Eskimo and Rivers’ 1906 The Todas. Research expeditions were being commissioned expressly for the purpose of collecting such information, even if those excursions only allowed brief stops among several peoples. Even so, in his 1908 lecture on social anthropology, Frazer emphasized the urgency of securing “without delay full and accurate reports” of the “perishing or changing peoples” in the non-Western world, declaring that “There is still time to send expeditions to these regions” ([2], p. 21).

Twentieth-century anthropology answered this call, best personified by Boas and Malinowski, who advocated direct and intimate knowledge of a people and their lifeways through long-term in-person fieldwork and participant observation, yielding an ethnography or written account of the fieldworker’s experience. For some, like Frazer, this still entailed the nineteenth-century holdover of “discovering the general laws which have regulated human history” ([2], p. 4), while for others, especially Boas and his school, the goal was more particularistic and less universal, more idiographic and less nomothetic.

The history of anthropology from Boas and Malinowski to today is better known than the previous period, so we will dwell on it more briefly, but the key point for us in this introductory chapter is the perhaps unanticipated and undesired proliferation of anthropologies over the last century. Some may have hoped that the professionalization of anthropology, and its new seat in university departments, would unify the discipline, whereas the opposite happened.

The most fundamental disciplinary schism was between cultural anthropology and social anthropology, typically if loosely ascribed to Boas and Malinowski, respectively. Cultural anthropology, favored in the United States, predictably placed culture at the center of interest, often with a distinctly psychological bent; lacking its own psychological theory, it regularly absorbed psychoanalytic terms, concepts, and even tools (like the Rorschach test). Social anthropology, based more firmly in the United Kingdom, was construed by its chief advocate, Radcliffe-Brown, as natural science and comparative sociology (in fact, a branch of sociology); the mandate was not to study culture (which was invisible if real at all) but rather social relations and social processes, which were actually observable. Ultimately, Radcliffe-Brown’s social anthropology sought Frazerian laws of society; it was to be a nomothetic and comparative project instead of a primarily descriptive or ethnographic one. Radcliffe-Brown overtly despaired of the ethnographic turn of the discipline.

Especially within the cultural camp, the propagation of multiple anthropologies accelerated. Some clung to Boasian salvage anthropology, collecting the remnants of indigenous cultures while they were still available (just as Frazer counseled them to do), often mixing in psychology and linguistics, as did Sapir. Others, like Boas’ student Kroeber, adopted an anti-psychological stance, treating culture as an independent emergent level of reality which could and should be studied apart from the mere “carriers” of culture that were breathing human beings. At the opposite extreme, numerous American anthropologists partnered with psychoanalyst Kardiner to do essentially psychological analyses of entire cultures or societies; others like Hallowell took psychoanalytic theories and tests into the field. Across the Atlantic, British anthropology devised its own theories, such as Malinowski’s largely individualistic functionalism and Radcliffe-Brown’s more collective or institutional structural functionalism, which queried not what culture did for individuals but how it contributed to the stability and perpetuation of society—granting, as Radcliffe-Brown did, that when you think you are studying culture, “you are always studying the acts of behavior of a specific set of persons who are linked in a social structure” ([11], p. 106).

Within just a few decades, anthropology passed through the first of its crises and reformulations, as the next generation of practitioners expressed frustration with the disappointments of their predecessors. Consequently, the discipline struck out in new directions. One was the “culturology” of White, who as early as 1940 highlighted symbolic thinking, or “symboling,” as the essence of culture; soon, he separated (and derogated) the study of behavior (which he dubbed psychology) from the study of culture or culturology, that is, the study of “real things and events observable, directly or indirectly, in the external world,” materialized as/in symbols ([12], p. 235). He and Steward also revived evolutionism, although on a more quantitative and multilinear footing.

Another initiative launched around the same time was cognitive anthropology, componential analysis, ethnoscience, or what its champions called “the new ethnography.” The aim here, as formulated by Goodenough, Frake, and Tyler, was to expose the knowledge that members of a society putatively had in their heads which made action in their cultural world possible. Critics like Frake accused prior ethnographers of naïvely collecting local words for things, while the new ethnographers “redefine the task as one of finding the ‘things’ that go with the words…. An ethnographer should strive to define objects according to the conceptual systems of the people he is studying” [13], p. 435). The output would be a folk taxonomy or classification scheme of relevant semantic domains.

Probably the most celebrated theoretical approach of mid-century was the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on recent advances in linguistics, he proposed treating culture like a language, comprising elements in “grammatical” relationships, such that meaning was in the grammar, not the isolated bits. First applying this approach to kinship, he turned to religion and mythology, where he literally suggested cutting myths into pieces or “mythemes” and searching for the recurring structural patterns within the pieces. More controversially, he proposed that cultural grammars could be understood as manifestations of a universal mental process of binary classification, with the mind constantly struggling to resolve the irresolvable contradictions spawned by such mentation.

Not to belabor the point, but other schools arose, often critical of the ones just mentioned, like symbolic or interpretive anthropology (associated with Turner and Geertz), hostile (at least in Geertz’s mind) to the ornate but unrealistic theorizing of Lévi-Strauss. Inspired by philosophers such as Ryle, Cassirer, and Langer, symbolic anthropology put meaning and symbols at the core of analysis, encouraging anthropologists to read culture like a text. Simultaneously, the cultural materialism of Harris claimed to explain culture as the effect of practical visceral causes. Other anthropologists like Bloch and Godelier turned to Marxism to identify the class-based and ideological underpinnings of cultural domination. Another critical approach to anthropology was feminist anthropology, which labored to unveil (and undo) the sex/gender-based relationships and inequalities that pervaded not only cultures but the discipline of anthropology itself.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, anthropology was experiencing a greater and more sustained crisis, leading to a variety of efforts to “rethink” or “reinvent” the discipline. The problem largely stemmed from the continuing identification of anthropology with non-Western, tribal, or worst of all primitive peoples: as late as 1950, in a series of lectures Evans-Pritchard opined that social anthropology was the branch of sociological research “which chiefly devotes itself to primitive societies” ([14], p. 11), while in the introduction to his 1952 collection of essays Radcliffe-Brown designated it “the study of what are called primitive or backward people” ([11], p. 2). By the 1960s, it was becoming unacceptable to label any group as primitive; further, those peoples had themselves changed dramatically, including becoming agents and subjects in their own right rather than mere objects of Western investigation, and anthropology’s scope was expanding beyond those societies to include modern nation-states and global cultural systems. Subsequently, anthropologists launched an auto-critique in the form, for instance, of Leach’s 1961 Rethinking Anthropology and Hymes’ 1969 edited volume Reinventing Anthropology. This self-questioning extended to some fundamental anthropological concepts such as “primitive society” (e.g., Kuper’s 1988 The Invention of Primitive Society) and “culture” (e.g., Wagner’s 1975 The Invention of Culture).

Soon, another sacred facet of anthropology—ethnographic writing—came under scrutiny, in Clifford and Marcus’ impactful 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. The issue was and is the so-called problem of representation, and Clifford pronounced in his introduction to the volume that ethnography is not and cannot be a simple, positivistic representation of culture but “is always caught up in the invention” of its subject-matter, an exercise in poiesis or composition, a form of literature with its inherent genres, styles, and traditions, and therefore only partially “true” ([15], p. 2). It only took five more years for Abu-Lughod to dare anthropologists not to write culture but to write against culture, arguing that the culture concept exaggerates homogeneity and coherence and that anthropologists are better served by thinking in terms of “discourse and practice,” “connections,” and “the particular” ([16], pp. 147–150).

Among the most recent assaults on conventional anthropological thinking are multi-species ethnography (which emphasizes relations between humans and non-human life-forms) and Latour’s Actor Network Theory (which views humans as only part of composite agentive networks that conjoin individual people, animals, plants, tools, machines, and objects). Finally, ontological anthropology, at least in the version promoted by Holbraad among others, also rejects the representationalist approach to culture, insisting that the very idea of culture implies representation. Such ontological anthropologists posit a more radical methodological agenda: rather than to describe “culture” in the sense of another people’s representation of a supposed objective reality, the challenge is to find their reality. As Holbraad and Petersen explain it, the business of anthropology is to grasp the encounter with human difference as “not so much a matter of ‘seeing differently’…. It is above all a matter of seeing different things” ([17], p. 6).

5. Christian anthropology

It is worth pausing briefly to consider that many of anthropology’s key terms and concepts, like race and culture, are borrowed from everyday discourse, and this goes to a certain extent for the word “anthropology” itself. Professional, academic anthropology has no monopoly on the word, and other fields and traditions have used it with varying meaning and import. A significant example is Christianity, which conceives its own, religion-inflected anthropology. Clearly, Sachs was correct when he stated that the Christian faith “has a particular vision of the world and of humanity,” one that is necessarily “founded upon the relationship between God and God’s creation as revealed in the person and ministry of Jesus Christ” ([18], p. 8).

In a more recent treatment, Chathanatt and Mangai begin by stipulating that Christian anthropology, like all other iterations to an extent, pursues “answers to the fundamental questions about the origin, meaning, purpose, and goal of human existence”; the “two points of departure” for this singular enterprise are that “human beings are created in the image of God and human beings are revealed in Jesus Christ” ([19], p. 218). Much of what they actually say about the subject bears the tone of Christian existentialism from Kierkegaard to Tillich: humans are essentially relational beings, such that “To be human means to be interhuman, in relation, to be with, to be interpersonal” (p. 220). Their anthropology also shares with academic anthropology a recognition of the dual body-and-culture nature of humanity (viewed as body-and-soul in their case) as well as of the fact that as humans “we make language as we communicate; we create culture; we make history” (pp. 218–219). Where the two versions of anthropology part company is at the Christian-anthropological conception of humanity as the image of God, warped by original sin, saved by grace, and perfected in the incarnation of Jesus: in their words, “To be authentically and fully human is to be conformed to” Jesus (p. 223). Academic anthropology cannot go there, of course, because other societies and cultures have their own, non-Christian ideas of humanness.

This short diversion is important because, aside from the appreciation that much of pre-1900 scholarly anthropology was still under the influence of Christian doctrine, it illustrates that anthropology—if not exactly a science of humankind then notions and discourses about humankind—is not limited to and owned by the modern professionals. Indeed, it is a worthwhile reminder that every religion, in fact every cultural tradition, has its understandings of what it means to be human, for instance about personhood and who or what possesses it, how humans should organize and comport themselves, and what it is all about or for. Professional academic anthropology is only one among the world’s (sometimes tacit) anthropologies.

6. World anthropologies

Finally, speaking of the world’s anthropologies, there is a literal movement of world anthropologies, demonstrating that professional academic anthropology itself is multiple and various, related to the national or temporal context where it is known and practiced. Even within the West, anthropologies have been diverse; at the very minimum, as we noted, cultural anthropology and social anthropology long followed different paths. Other Western countries have their own histories, traditions, and interests in their anthropologies. Debaene notes, for instance, the French mid-twentieth century habit of writing two books on their fieldwork, one a “scientific” ethnography and the other what amounts to a work of “literature” [20]. Darnell and Gleach have written repeatedly on national formations of anthropology, as in their 2014 Anthropologists and Their Traditions across National Borders and their 2017 Historizing Theories, Identities, and Nations.

Some of the essays in the volumes edited by Darnell and Gleach touch on non-Western anthropologies too, but others make them their principal mission. Chief among these are van Bremen, Ben-Ari, and Alatas’ 2005 Asian Anthropology (not anthropology of Asia but anthropology as done in Asia), Bošković’s 2008 Other People’s Anthropologies (subtitled “Ethnographic Practice on the Margins”), and most directly Ribeiro and Escobar’s 2006 World Anthropologies (subtitled “Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power”). Even before them, Cardoso De Oliveira published a 1999 essay on “Peripheral Anthropologies ‘Versus’ Central Anthropologies,” underscoring the issue of the dominance of Western, especially Anglophone, versions of the discipline [21]. Sadly, he died in 2006, unable to witness the efflorescence of his perspective.

Much of the impetus for world anthropologies has emanated from Latin America, and Ribeiro and Escobar may have said it best when they insisted that “the idea of a single or general anthropology is called into question” ([22], p. 1). Demanding not an overthrow or negation but a provincializing of Western/Anglophone anthropology, they rightly plead that anthropological discourses and practices as they have existed so far “are particular and historically located, not universal as it generally assumed” (pp. 3–4). To begin to make good on the promise of multiple anthropologies, the movement has institutionalized into several organizations including International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, World Council of Anthropological Associations, and World Anthropologies Network.

7. Conclusion

Given this perplexing but invigorating history, it is little wonder that anthropology has suffered from chronic identity crisis. Partly, this comes with the territory: humans are a multi-dimensional biological, psychological, and sociocultural species, so any science of humans will be multi-dimensional. Humans are also variable in all these domains, in the past, the present, and undoubtedly the future, so any science of humans will be variable. In short, everything that humans do, they do diversely, including their self-studies, their anthropologies.

Some aspects of the science of humankind have survived the ages, while others are new and unfinished. Anthropologists need not make excuses or confess shame at any of the mistakes or excesses of previous thinking; all of those ideas, as in any other discipline or endeavor, were products of their time and steps toward new and better anthropologies. These current and emerging anthropologies promise to exceed older ones, as they exceed the human itself, recognizing as we do that humanity is an inherently incomplete transcendent project and that humans are enmeshed with non-humans (animals, plants, machines, spirits, and more) in relational networks from which humans cannot be disassembled. It is with these points in mind, and contributing to their evolving insights and implications, that the chapters in this volume are offered.

Conflict of interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.