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6. What are your views on anthropology?
It is a very useful discipline which at one time greatly preoccupied me. My major point of disagreement with anthropology is that it tends to stand aloof from citizen ideas and concerns. One of my favourite anthropological works is a booklet written by two academics and published at Cambridge in 1993. Amongst other things, the authors asserted that “we emulate the passionate amateurs of history who circulated new and radical ideas to as wide an audience as possible; and we hope in the process to reinvent anthropology as a means of engaging with society” (A. Grimshaw and K. Hart, Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals, quoted in my Some Philosophical Critiques and Appraisals, 2004, pp. 254, 325 note 813). That perspective still seems to be quite rare.
One of the queries I had related to the official boundary line between anthropology and sociology. Did these two really have to be separate disciplines? Not all academics actually believed that they did, and in certain other countries there was more freedom in crossing boundaries. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it is best to blur boundaries between various other disciplines also. In this way I ventured in 1984 the initial formulation of my version of anthropography. The major trigger for this was the polemical strategy of Professor Marvin Harris (1927-2001), an American anthropologist who became noted for his provocative approach.
An early work of Harris was The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968). This book was recognised to have merits, though the author subsequently gained a controversial reputation for format. Harris formulated what he called cultural materialism, which was the title of a later book in which he challenged rivals to explicate a due “research strategy” to match his own. His Cultural Materialism (1979; new edn, 2001) demonstrated a “boxing ring” tactic in which he took on all rivals, and it was unique in anthropology. That edged book caused offence in some directions.
A number of other anthropologists acknowledged the Harris challenge as a stimulus to debate, though many ignored him or repudiated his approach. The eminent British anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach (1910-1989) penned a review which accused Harris of a vulgar materialism. The Leach criticism was in sympathy with Levi-Strauss, the structuralist who was rather bluntly dismissed by Harris.
Marvin Harris
The polemical research strategy of Marvin Harris is sometimes described as a form of neo-materialism. He was careful to repudiate new wave Marxists. Cultural materialism claimed both David Hume and Karl Marx as inspirers, though Harris pruned Marxist tenets to a more empirical context. He insisted upon an “operationalised” vocabulary that pursued accuracy in definition. He attacked Freudian psychodynamics, the sociobiology of Edward O. Wilson, dialectical materialism, structural Marxism, “cognitive idealism,” and structuralism. Harris was very notably in opposition to the French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, whom he tended almost to deride. Harris also stressed a behaviorist approach in contrast to “phenomenological” attitudes such as those of Carlos Castaneda.
I found Harris more compelling in an argumentative sense than Levi-Strauss, though also too brusque in his dismissal (I was not a convert to either of the ideologies involved). I was very averse to Castaneda, who was by now notorious amongst academics for a resort to fiction, a factor overlooked by the enormous popular demand for his distracting books. Yet overall, I was in strong disagreement with the cultural materialist version of empiricism. This became evident in my rival “research strategy” composed in 1984 and published several years later under the title Meaning in Anthropos (1991). That effort opted for an outright interdisciplinary approach in which the anthropological argument became the springboard for other analyses, critiques, and reflections.
My own strategy made a reference to an idealist affinity. This may be taken to represent an extension of the “cognitive idealism” contested by cultural materialism. Harris acknowledged the scientific dimensions of the cognitive rival, and was more cautious in his repudiations of that sector. His argument was basically that the cognitivists represented an “emic” stance, whereas cultural materialism was demonstrating “etic” prowess. Usage of these twin terms is controversial; they can easily amount to a simplistic rationale. Harris employed these terms as key significators. The materialist versus idealist argument has taken a variety of forms over the generations, and in social science there are different connotations to the philosophical and theological debates. Harris produced quite a strong argument that was new to anthropology, but there are flaws in his approach that the cognitive thrust can penetrate, if sufficiently informed.
The anthropological materialist came from a poor family in Brooklyn, and was apparently of Russian Jewish extraction. His career eventually took him to the University of Florida, where he is said to have mellowed during the 1980s after moving from a more turbulent phase at Columbia University. See the relevant details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Harris. During the 70s, he produced general circulation works like Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches (1974) and Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (1977). Those books tackled a wide variety of phenomena from a materialist standpoint. His annoyance with structuralism surfaced more strongly in Cultural Materialism, in which he was evidently aiming to knock Levi-Strauss out of the anthropological boxing ring. Cf. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (2 vols, 1963-76).
Marvin Harris was unusual for his bold arguments which he presented quite lucidly, though in contrast to him, I believe that Hume and Marx both tripped up over the ultimate questions. The etic/emic classification is not sufficient to solve those and lesser questions, and I no longer use that terminology, which Harris adopted extensively (the classification derived from linguistics, and became an intellectual fashion in social science). Above all, in both of the contending books primarily under discussion here, the overall concern was a science of culture, a matter reflected in both of the subtitles. The subtitle which Harris used for Cultural Materialism was The Struggle for a Science of Culture, whereas my own subtitle for Meaning in Anthropos became Anthropography as an interdisciplinary Science of Culture.
With regard to the structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss, this French anthropologist employed the methods of linguistics as a model for analysis of societies. He tended to imply that non-structuralist explanations were reductionist. His exegesis of mythology is not everywhere agreed upon, a factor applying very much to his Mythologiques (4 vols, 1964-71; English trans. 1969-81). His structuralism exerted a strong influence in France outside anthropology, and Levi-Strauss is one of the influences claimed upon the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (d.1981) and the philosopher Jacques Derrida (d.2004). In America, the “neomaterialist” Marvin Harris continued the cultural materialist programme with a version of national developments in his book entitled America Now (also known as Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology of Daily Life, 1981). Subsequent works of Harris were Our Kind (1989) and Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (1999).
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