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ROMANTIC MOTIVES AND THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY In its most general historical self-definition, anthropology has characteristically insisted on its status as an "ology"-glossed not simply as discourse, but as discourse which, like other proliferatingly institutionalized "ologies" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, claims to be a "science." Although its character varied somewhat in different national anthropological traditions, in general we may say that "anthropology" in the nineteenth century laid claim to being "the science ofman." And despite the transformations of the ensuing century and the periodic questionings of many of its practitioners and critics, it has not since abandoned that self-description (which has of course considerably enhanced its claims for support from outside the discipline). Legitimating origin accounts of the discipline tend to emphasize three cultural moments of especially powerful formative significance: some focus on the decades after 1850 (Penniman 1935; Service 1985); others look a century farther back (Evans-Pritchard 1950; Harris 1968); a few seek ancestral intellectual totems among the ancient Greeks (Kluckhohn 1961). It is immediately striking that each of these three formative moments was also a moment in the history of a general intellectual orientation which may be called developmental, progressive, or (loosely) evolutionary, and which construes the history of humankind as an ever-increasing knowledge of and control over the rest of the natural world through the processes of human reason (Bock 1956). From this perspective, all three moments may be regarded as part of a broader tradition that we associate with the Enlightenment. That, at least, was clearly the view of one of the discipline's major founding figures, E. B. Tylor, who decorated the title page of of Primitive Culture (1871) with an epigraph from one of the major works of Enlightenment "conjectural history." Although the early-twentieth-century "revolution in anthropology" (HOA 2; Jarvie 1964; Stocking 1989) was in many respects to transform the discipline, its historiography (expressing, no doubt, a very strong inclination within the disciplinary imago) still reflects this identification with the Enlightenment tradition-most strikingly, perhaps, in the tendency to regard the early nine3 4 ROMANTIC MOTIVES teenth century simply as an anthropological dark age dominated by racialism , and in the virtual neglect, within the Anglophone sphere, of the Germanic roots of cultural anthropology. There is, however, another side of the modern anthropological tradition which, variously manifest, has strongly influenced both the self- and public representation of the discipline. Perhaps most strikingly expressed in the image of "the anthropologist as herd'- Levi-Strauss in the Brazilian jungle (Sontag 1966), Malinowski or Mead alone among the natives on a South Sea island- this disciplinary alter ego reflects what has been called the "ethnographicization " that accompanied the revolution in anthropology of the early twentieth century (Stocking 1989). Rather than being, archetypically, an activity of the armchair or the study, anthropology came out of doors into the open air; what was most critical to the definition of the discipline was not so much the comparative perspective that it offered on the varieties ofhumankind as the detailed descriptive information that it could provide about particular groups outside the Western European tradition. This conception of anthropology might have been expected to produce a disciplinary historiography marked by quite different moments, and rooted less in Western speculations about scientific progress than in Western traditions of exploration and natural history. But, in fact, the history of the discipline as an "ography," or descriptive discourse, if not unwritten, is certainly much more lightly inscribed (cf. HOA 1; Boon 1982; Clifford 1988; Duchet 1971; Geertz 1988). The grounding of anthropological knowledge in the ethnographic text, and prior to that, in the interactive and reflexive experiential processes by which ethnographic texts are generated, calls our attention to other aspects of the contrapuntal anthropological tradition we are trying here to evoke (Geertz 1973; Clifford & Marcus 1986; Ruby 1982). Thus, on various occasions in the history of anthropology (as indeed in the history of the human sciences generally), it has been argued that there is a radical dichotomy between two forms of knowledge. What for American anthropologists may be regarded as the locus classicus of that distinction is a short essay on "The Study of Geography," which Franz Boas published a century ago. Written during the period when he was moving away from that discipline toward the one in which he was to play such an influential intellectual and institutional role (cf. Stocking 1968, 1974), the essay distinguished two modes of scientific inquiry. On the one hand, there...

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