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Conclusion: Doing History of Anthropology
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273 Conclusion Doing History of Anthropology Those who have come along through explorations of the historical connections I have made in the preceding chapters are unlikely to expect a conclusion that proclaims the Truth that anthropology or human sciences more generally should be pursuing or has discovered. Instead, I want to draw on my experience of questioning “just-so” stories about intellectual connections in the past to offer some suggestions about how not to do history of a field. I have given some thought of late to my own intellectual genealogy and—if that is not narcissistic enough a topic to contemplate—the history of the history of anthropology. The title of my PhD dissertation was “Social Science Networks.” Robert Redfield once said that an academic discipline is at once a group of people in persisting social relations and a method of investigation. He further noted that “the two kinds of relations, social and methodological , are mutually influential, but neither determines the other” (1953:728). I think that I began with a focus on the social and drifted to focus increasingly on shared practices—methods rather than methodologies— and on shared assumptions about what should be studied how. Trying to make sense of where the history of anthropology in general and my work in particular came from, it seems to me that there are two streams of what I would call emic history of anthropology. I want to say something about these streams both as social groupings and as methods of investigation. What I see as the first serious work on the history of anthropology that aimed to understand the past in its own terms rather than to promote the author’s position or positions in the present and tried to contextualize ideas from the past as something other than building blocks of current models was done by students trained in Frederick Teggart’s Department 274 Conclusion of Social Institutions at Berkeley. Teggart taught a course on the history of the idea of progress during the 1930s that aimed to make sense of the concept progress in the intellectual contexts of different times in western history. One of his protégés—who later became my first graduate school mentor in social theory—Robert Nisbet eventually crystallized that into a book, History of the Idea of Progress, published in 1980, that should be— but has not has been—of interest to historians of anthropology. Two of Teggart’s other students more directly examined the interrelations of social theory and the accounts by explorers, travelers, and missionaries of the beliefs, institutions, and physical characteristics of the peoples encountered and subjugated by Europeans between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Katherine Oakes completed a dissertation in 1944 on the shifting representations of Africans. Under her married name, Katherine George, she published a synopsis of this in Isis in 1958. Margaret T. Hodgen, who had been a student of Teggart’s and became his colleague, wrote what remains the standard and thus far definitive book Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, published in 1964. Back in 1936 she had published a history of the idea of “survivals .” In 1952, in an anthropological monograph series, she published an exemplification of how to examine cultural innovation and diffusion across time and space, Change and History, and she followed that book and Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries with a book that attempted to tell anthropologists how to do history, titled Anthropology , History, and Social Change, in 1974. There is certainly a Teggartian tradition with a catastrophist rather than a gradualist view of cultural change. This tradition also includes repeated criticisms of the use of the comparative method and of unilinear cultural evolution (while recommending comparisons). In addition to Nisbet, Kenneth Bock continued this tradition, not least in criticizing sociobiology. Both as a student of a student of both Teggart and Hodgen (Robert Nisbet) and as the author of a history of the Berkeley Department of Social Institutions based heavily on the views of Hodgen, Bock, and Nisbet (chapter 13), I can readily claim a legitimate academic genealogical connection to this tradition of intellectual history of social science . However, although I certainly share some assumptions—in particular catastrophism in its Kuhnian form as “scientific revolutions” (punctu- [100.25.40.11] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:17 GMT) Conclusion 275 ating Brownian motion of professors’ theoretical and methodological approaches)—I don’t think that my work is very much like that of Teggart...