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Anthropology in the UK: Never
Mind the Biographies, Here's
the Reflexive Symbols
PATRICK LAVIOLETTE
Available online: 22 May 2008
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Mind the Biographies, Here's the Reflexive Symbols, Reviews in Anthropology, 37:2-3,
231-258
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ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UK: NEVER MIND THE
BIOGRAPHIES, HERE’S THE REFLEXIVE SYMBOLS
Patrick Laviolette
Fardon, Richard. Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography. London:
Routledge, 1999. xx þ 315 pp.
Grinker, Roy Richard. In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 [2000]. xii þ 368 pp.
Tambiah, Stanley J. Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvii þ 517 pp.
Van Tilburg, Jo Anne. Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge
and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island. New York: Scribner, 2003.
xiii þ 351 pp.
Young, Michael W. Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xxix þ 690 pp.
Focusing on the concept of the intellectual biography, I explore the relational
and symbolic importance of life histories for the reflexive history of
PATRICK LAVIOLETTE is Senior Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture
at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand. Regional interests involve
Cornwall, London, and New Zealand. Thematic interests include landscape,
metaphor, performance, phenomenology and the senses, maps, recyclia and
installation art, cooperative housing, assistive technologies, and medical
sociology. Recent publications have appeared in Cornish Studies, the Journal
of Material Culture, the International Journal of Heritage Studies,
Performance and Place, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and Home
Cultures. Patrick has just guest edited a series of articles on alternative sport
for Anthropology Today.
Address correspondence to Patrick Laviolette, School of Visual and Material Culture,
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand. E-mail: p.laviolette@massey.ac.nz
Reviews in Anthropology, 37: 231–258, 2008
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online
DOI: 10.1080/00938150802038943
Downloadedby[TallinnUniversity]at04:4726March2012
anthropology. Legacies of questioning disciplinary self-awareness exist
for fieldwork, data analysis, writing up, and academic social networks.
The intellectual biography, as a newly developing self-conscious genre, is
becoming central to the way in which the discipline writes its own history.
This article situates five recent biographies of ‘‘British’’ anthropologists
into a theoretical, methodological, and intellectual landscape
that encompasses the international development of a century of social
anthropology in the United Kingdom.
Keywords: British intellectual landscapes, disciplinary life histories, epistemology,
reflexivity
INTRODUCTION
Don’t know what I want
But I know how to get it.
—Lydon 1976
This ironic dictum from the Sex Pistols’ song ‘‘Anarchy in the
UK’’ helped launch the counter-cultural punk movement just over
thirty years ago. It can also be said to encompass some of the tensions
that occur between practical experience and intellectual conceptualization.
Such epistemological negotiations through the disciplinary
self-awareness of methodological and theoretical construction
in the development of British social anthropology from the turn of
the 20th century provide the rationale for this essay, the main
objective of which is to examine five recent biographical texts about
some of our anthropological elders in the United Kingdom.
But as my subtitle suggests, most of these books are not quite
biographies in the strict sense of the term. On the whole they portray
a vast, complex, intellectual landscape and cover a deep and troubled
investigative heritage. Given the fairly extensive impact of British
social anthropology, which has been quite rich in terms of interpretive
texture and political and cultural capital, this legacy has
occasionally been followed, felt and sometimes even feared the world
over. Hence in themselves, and as a collective ‘‘bio’’ -regional
assemblage, these books are symbols of anthropology’s reflexive
history (Ruby 1982; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992). That is, they form part of a discursive turn that dates
to when anthropologists began taking seriously the understanding and
study of an unusual ‘‘species’’—themselves (Bourdieu 1988).
This turn was itself largely influenced by the early developments of
ethnography and the struggle that anthropologists from Europe had
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to face in light of the discipline’s imperial, colonial, and paternal
associations (Kuklick 1991; Urry 1992). Yet it is important to single
out that a certain reflexivity through biographical and autobiographical
writing is nothing new. Such accounts of Victorian
anthropologists began to appear as early as the 1940s (Marett 1941;
Quiggin 1942). This intermittently continued through the next five
decades with the publication of life histories, diaries, interviews,
lecture notes, and obituaries of the more recent founding ancestors of
fieldwork-led, modern British anthropology (Firth 1957; Kuper 1973;
Stocking 1996). For example, the interest in Malinowski’s career by
the author of the first biography reviewed here, Michael Young, itself
dates to the 1970s.
Nevertheless, we are presently witnessing a new burgeoning biographical
interest in the lives and experiences of our anthropological
forbearers, in Britain and elsewhere. If the hefty 2000 pages in these
books about five different ‘‘British’’ anthropologists is anything to go
by, then they are perhaps indicative that the discipline in the United
Kingdom remains eclectic in how it portrays itself biographically. At
one extreme is the focus on the individualist ‘‘warts and all’’ type of
popular narrative about interesting or charismatic subjects. At the
other are the more historiographic accounts that uncover epistemic
disciplinary structures as reflected through the lives and works of
certain key thinkers who have achieved prominence.
This article argues that as a newly emerging, self-conscious genre,
the biography to a small degree but more importantly the contextualized,
intellectual biography in particular will be crucial to the
development of anthropological reflexivity. In other words, I suggest
that intellectual biographies are becoming increasingly fundamental
to the way in which the discipline continues to write its own history
(Bourdieu 1990).
Reflexivity: Bending Back Disciplinary Bones
Social anthropologists largely began to be self-aware of questioning
the authority of their own ethnographic representations of other
cultures in the 1960s. Particular reflexivity camps emerged in the
social sciences in this period as an inherent critique of positivism. For
example, Schutz (1962) advocated phenomenological approaches;
Garfinkel (1967) advanced ethnomethodology; Turner (1974)
explored social dramas and creativity; Bloor (1976) promoted the
sociology of scientific knowledge; and Ashmore (1989) among others
was interested in postmodernism. By the mid-1970s, during the
heyday of structural functionalism, social anthropologists (as opposed
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to sociologists) were already showing less interest in examining their
own oeuvre and its theoretical assumptions as objects of research.
Nevertheless, some British anthropologists like Bateson (1980),
inspired by wider debates in cognitive science and epistemology,
upheld the concern for what the discipline could know about itself.
He pointed out that in being both subject and object of research, we
place ourselves in a situation where we can become aware of how
knowledge is accumulated, gathered and turned into ‘‘Knowledge’’
(i.e., information accepted and transmitted by a larger community of
scholars).
As structural functionalism’s power started to lose sway in late
1970s social anthropology, the speed of such shifts and challenges
increased. This was both the cause and consequence of a public
demand for more accessible entry into higher education. Such an
increase in the power of the grass roots did not result, as some had
anticipated it would, in the end of the university as a community of
scientists. Conversely, it was a sign of the rapid development of
hermeneutic (Gadamer 1975), biographical, and autobiographical
theories and concepts—positions that scholars were increasingly
willing to embrace (Okely and Callaway 1992; Reed-Danahay 1997).
Reflexivity has certainly had its advocates internationally across
the social sciences for over two decades now. This takes us to the
contemporary investigations of education and research. The critique
of writing in the ethnographic process has taught us that our depictions
communicate as much about ourselves as about our representations
of the world (Marcus and Fisher 1986). As Burawoy
(1991:7) states: ‘‘Participant observation is not only a paradigmatic
technique for studying others; it also points to a distinctive way of
understanding ourselves. The dialogue between participant and
observer extends itself naturally to a dialogue among social scientists.’’
This theoretical innovation has allowed insightful and farreaching
observations into the nature of the academic profession and
the processes involved in the production of knowledge. Notably,
recent approaches in the study of scientific knowledge have generated
a number of case studies in the vein of understanding how experimental
analyses are vulnerable to the observer’s interests and values
(Latour 1987). In spite of this, few ethnographers have been concerned
to empirically examine research in their own fields. This is
perhaps due to the fear of appearing self-obsessive and narcissistic
given that reflexive conceptual frames are already incorporated into
the formulation of participant-observation (Boissevain 1974).
One endeavor in this direction is Kurzman’s (1991) interrogation
into the affinities between values and interests in the production of
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knowledge. He provides a continuum of social distance between
observer and observed, researcher and subject. Kurzman claims that
the sentiments of social distance extend to the main interests of all
ethnographers using participant-observation. In this sense, the ethnographer’s
role in the field allows fieldworkers to pursue political
goals as well as make observations and gather data whereas the niche
for social theory in the academic world guards against individualist
critiques at one extreme and dehumanizing interpretations at the
other.
The upshot of this reasoning is that ethnographers swing dichotomously
between their subjects and their relations to other social
scientists. Unfortunately, this process sometimes violates the ties
between research interests and community needs since the contextualization
of participant-observation work can be disempowering
for one’s subjects. This illustrates that contemporary studies on the
process of doing research occasionally frame knowledge production
as a vehicle for domination. Realizations of this kind place the
notions of biography and autobiography into a paramount position
in the study of higher education. Such perspectives allow continuity
and change, decent and revision, preservation and innovation, to
complement each other in the production of knowledge. Ergo,
reflexive histories become individualistic, disciplinary, and crossdisciplinary
tools at the same time.
Biographies of anthropologists teach us something significant in
this respect. By revealing the importance of diaries and informal
personal documents as well as polished articles and monographs, they
can help trace the anthropologist’s meanderings between ontology
and epistemology—between experience, method, and theory. Such
sources are valuable in uncovering and debunking imperial, colonial
or other potentially questionable processes that might or might not
have implicitly occurred through the practice of fieldwork (Loizos
1977). With these conceptual points about epistemic reflexivity in
mind, let us now move on to examine the texts individually, in reverse
order of their publication date since this is more or less inverse to the
chronology of influence for the characters involved.
BOOKMARKS, HALLMARKS, AND RE-MARKS
Young on Malinowski
Michael Young’s biography of Bronislaw Malinowski (2004) does
not look at the last twenty-two years of his life from the 1920s
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onwards. This will be the topic of a much-anticipated follow-up
biography by Young, when Malinowski truly becomes an international
figure. The book strikes a nice balance between illustrating
personal information about Malinowski’s formative period of
ethnographic training whilst examining in considerable detail the
implications of this budding career for the methodological and
theoretical developments of British social anthropology. Despite its
610 pages of challenging material, this first volume is remarkably
easy to read. For some time to come, it will be by far the most
comprehensive survey of the vast archive of files, communications,
and academic writings surrounding this pioneer fieldworker.
Furthermore, it is not only essential reading to those interested in
Malinowski studies but will also be highly informative to anyone
interested in the history of anthropological thought.
The text is divided into three parts. The first provides considerable
detail about Malinowski’s parents and his first twenty-five years of
life. The second chronicles the shortest period of four years during
which the Pole meandered between London and his homeland. The
final section richly covers those busy six years when Malinowski was
exiled in the South Pacific by World War I. In this book Young
eloquently reveals how Malinowski’s fascination with the construction
of his own persona led him to conceptualize the theoretical
foundations for myth as social charter and eventually functionalism.
We are also shown some of the ways in which his near obsession with
his own social standing lay behind his unprecedented methodological
innovations in the field. The book equally begins to scrutinize the
mysterious aura and elusive pedagogic style that this charismatic
actor was adopting. This of course would eventually attract what
were to become some of the most influential people in the professional
founding of the discipline.
If there were any serious criticism of this volume it would simply be
that on a few occasions Young seems to unchallengingly accept some
of Malinowski’s main theses. For example, the ignorance on the part
of Trobrianders of the father’s influence in sexual reproduction (what
has come to be known as the ‘‘virgin birth debate’’) has been much
more contested than is given credit. In Young’s defense, he does
acknowledge that the concern over the physiology of reproduction
has been ‘‘one of the hoariest debates in social anthropology’’
(Young 2004:180). He even admits in his introduction that certain
theoretical exchanges in which the pater of functionalism was
involved are better exposed by others. ‘‘Expositions and critiques of
Malinowski’s theories and of his work are legion. . . . It would have
hindered my narrative immeasurably, and added inordinately to its
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length, to engage with this vast literature at every turn’’ (p. xxii). He
further claims that his aim is to give voice to Malinowski and his
colleagues while wishing to avoid confrontation with his own contemporaries,
so that he sees his book as a literary biography based on
historical sources rather than an intellectual one based on more
recent assessments of Malinowski’s legacy to the wider writings of
social anthropologists. I feel Young is selling himself short here and
would argue that his extensive tome is more than just both but a fine
example of each. Indeed, in addition to the 46 pages of chapterdivided
endnotes, he provides a healthy 12 page bibliography of
scholarly research, plus an additional reference page to Malinowski’s
manuscripts.
Nevertheless, even if it were ‘‘simply’’ an historical piece of literary
biography, in the case of the particular debate about Trobriand
paternity, what Young has done is to ignore not only his own colleagues
but also those of his Polish-cum-British protagonist. For
instance, he writes that the epidemiologist Raynor Bellamy ‘‘had
discovered what Malinowski was later able to confirm: that Trobrianders
denied any link between male insemination and female
conception’’ (p. 387); later he adds that Sir James George Frazer had
been ‘‘pleased to infer that his own pet theory concerning the
ignorance of physiological paternity had been confirmed in the field
by an ethnographer of Malinowski’s calibre’’ (p. 436). Such statements
give the impression that this conclusion was correctly taken for
granted and not adequately challenged in this period of Malinowski’s
life. Undoubtedly Young will deal with this issue in a more complex
way in the following book, during the period when more people got
involved in this discussion like the colonial official, Leo Austen. In
the meantime, however, Tambiah’s (2002) discussion of Edmund
Leach’s later contribution to this debate in the 1960s and 1970s is
much more exhaustive.
As we will see, however, the difference in styles is such that
Tambiah’s and Fardon’s (1999) books are purely intellectual biographies
at the expense of what Young provides regarding an array of
biographical detail which rarely falters. If on occasion the text overall
does slightly waver, then this would be when it comes to some of the
generalizations that the author makes about the nature of the discipline.
One example is when he says without substantiation or further
explanation that the participant-observation of a good ethnographer
‘‘requires the alertness of every sense’’ (p. 536). Undoubtedly, yet I
am curious as to why these more general comments are not elaborated
upon to the same extent as the sophisticated descriptions he
provides for the ways in which his protagonist’s personal history
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details were intertwined with the intellectual building blocks of such
an innovative thinker.
Somewhat pedantically, I admit, I also feel that Young could have
elaborated upon some of the passing statements he makes regarding
the impact of Malinowski’s ‘‘fatalism’’ on his musings and theorizing.
For example, he writes without much elaboration, that
. . .he also had a vague, equally irrational conviction that they had
‘already paid the ransom to fate.’ Introspective insight such as this
informed his anthropological theory of religion, which held that
beliefs in Providence and Immortality were fundamental. If he found
it impossible to believe in the latter, he obscurely believed in the first.
[p. 506]
As a counter example, the fullness in which Young considers his
protagonist’s contribution to the discipline should be noted. In this
sense, it is important that he has identified some of the perceptions
which local people, both native and expatriate, had of the troubled
European ethnographer. It is interesting to see Young follow this
level of postcolonial analysis in the wider context of his character’s
social networks, allowing him to suggest that ‘‘Malinowski, it seems,
was part of Hunt and Haddon’s larger plan for governmentsponsored
anthropology in both Papua and New Guinea’’ (p. 377).
Furthermore, he even addresses the complexities of disciplinary
reflexivity by demonstrating that Malinowski was aware of but not
troubled with the issue:
‘‘to what extent introspective analysis modifies psychic state’’ could
well be reformulated for the eyewitnessing fieldworker: to what extent
did his presence modify the behaviour of those islanders under his
observation? There is scant evidence, however, that this question
bothered him. [p. 542]
Malinowski’s life has of course been extensively described already,
so on the whole this account is there to fill the gaps. Social anthropologists
will nevertheless cherish this volume for the thick description
that it provides regarding his theoretical opposition to
evolutionism and diffusionism; his confessions that the omission of
post-contact change had been the greatest shortcoming of his monographs;
and his stance of insider-ness and immersive participantobservation
which allowed him to devise methods of deconstructing
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the difference between what informants said versus what thy did. The
book also describes in more varied detail than has ever previously
been noted the many bureaucratic influences and limitations on
Malinowski’s movements during his time in the South Pacific
(Malinowski 1967). This, Young aptly concludes, has done the
discipline an enormous favor by embedding precedents for individual
autonomy and longevity into the practice of fieldwork.
Van Tilburgh on Routledge
Centering around a two year core on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), this
book is divided into two further sections which cover the before and
after periods of Katherine Routledge’s life. Jo Anne Van Tilburgh’s
(2003) biography of Routledge, and to a lesser extent of her husband,
William Scoresby-Routledge, should not be judged in light of its
significance to social anthropology since it is not particularly an
academic book. Rather, it reads exceptionally well for what it is—a
popular biographical travel and expedition log. Unfortunately,
however, this is not a genre that I feel suitably qualified to review.
Nor would it be very useful to consider it as such for a scholarly
journal, so my critique might seem unnecessary harsh.
If this were to be an intellectual biography, then part of the
problem that Van Tilburgh would have been faced with is that the
Routledges actually left little by way of any renowned theoretical
legacy. That is, they had little academic power, no followers in the
form of students or researchers of their own, and added little to the
theoretical developments of the field. In part, this is surely due to
their lack of credentials and institutional affiliation. Van Tilburgh
does point this out but mostly in terms of the ‘‘academic freedom’’
that it gave them. What is overlooked, however, is the level to which
their contribution to the British or world scene of emerging archaeological
and ethnological theory was largely negligible, despite their
substantial contribution, as peripatetic members of the intellectual
aristocracy, to the imperial process itself.
Unfortunately, in terms of reflexive disciplinary insight, Van
Tilburgh does not seriously unpack this issue of Routledge’s overall
insignificance, preferring to glorify the contribution that her protagonists
made to expedition anthropology as well as to archaeological
excavation techniques and survey field methods. Consequently, she
has opted to portray a sensationalistic life history account instead of
contextualizing the Rapa Nui material into larger intellectual discourses,
other than the academic debate about the origins of the
Islanders. This is singled out as one of Routledge’s life ambitions and
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therefore as the catalyst behind her subsequent projects in the South
Pacific (Van Tilburgh 2003:205–214). But at the time, this was surely
an issue that was academic in the more derogatory sense of the word
since there does not appear to be any realizations whereby, for these
colonial explorers at least, the posing of such riddles and their
empirical answers were inherently contestable. That is, bound up with
disagreements between certain theoretical camps like diffusionism
and evolutionism, let alone the more complex reflections to arise
decades later in terms of the politics of representation and postcolonial
theory.
It is interesting that these wider issues are not addressed explicitly
given the excellent job that Van Tilburgh does in indicating that the
Routledge project, through Katherine’s initiative and compassion,
ultimately became part of an ethical ideal to champion indigenous
causes and highlight cases of injustice, oppression and discrimination.
Furthermore, the author does establish that one of the Routledges’
expedition research questions regarding the connection between
Easter Island’s past and present inhabitants was convincingly
answered by them, thus demonstrating the mnemonic and sociopolitical
significance of cultural continuity (especially pp. 168–169).
In these terms, Van Tilburgh is able to underline an interesting and
significant contradiction on the part of her main characters: ‘‘The
irony, of course, was that the Routledges, who condemned the Rapa
Nui for thievery, were doing their own—arguably more detrimental—
kind of stealing, though they would have been shocked to hear it
called that’’ (p. 146). This is a highly relevant point that I am guessing
many other scholars might have followed up with a discussion about
colonialism or cultural ownership and repatriation.
A further example of where the book could be seen as inadequate
is in the little discussion of the Routledges’ published material which
itself was far from vast. For instance, their first co-authored book
about the Akikuyu receives specific attention in only the last three
paragraphs of the sixth chapter about British East Africa (ScoresbyRoutledge
and Routledge 1910). Much of this simply lists the places
and people who reviewed the work. With the exception of a few
lines, it hardly engages with anything that it says. Moreover, Van
Tilburgh’s biography does not (unlike Fardon[1999], for example, in
relation to E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s influence on Mary Douglas) go on
to elaborate about the theories and ideas of those who were influential
upon the protagonist. This seems like a wasted opportunity
given Routledge’s significant relationship with Robert Marett at
Oxford. A final point of critique is that the scholarly references of the
bibliography, totaling over twenty pages, are never cited in the text.
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Rather unusually (although Grinker [2000] has done the same) the
book does not even provide adequate citation in the text to the
archival sources used which are listed as an extensive sixty-plus pages
of endnotes.
As I have suggested, however, these reservations are only problematic
in terms of the academic rigor expected of an intellectual
biography. So in a sense I admit to barking up the wrong tree.
Consequently, the book’s best and most significant elements come
out initially through the thick historical description, which reveals the
power of the ocean in connecting Polynesian cultures (p. 111). Later
in her conclusion, Van Tilburgh rather unexpectedly makes the
Routledge story relevant to current times. Here she raises pressing
eco-heritage concerns by identifying certain conservation, environmental,
and archaeological protection issues that surround the island,
the Rapa Nui statues, and the protection of both local culture and
indigenous land claim rights. In this case, Van Tilburgh should be
applauded for her sensitivity to significant ecological and political
dilemmas. This raising the bar of awareness for such pressing social
and ecological matters is, for me, the most important component of
this book.
Grinker on Turnbull
Admittedly, it is problematic to talk about Colin Turnbull as a
British anthropologist given that his contributions only really took
place once he began to establish himself in America through his first
post as the African curator for the American Museum of Natural
History in New York. So even though he trained in Britain and his
work has of course had some impact in Europe, Roy Richard
Grinker (2001) convincingly shows how Turnbull has been much
more influential to American cultural anthropology. The contradiction
is more glaring once we acknowledge, as most do, that ultimately
Malinowski is a British social anthropologist (cf. Ellen et al. 1989).
This cross-Atlantic connection in Turnbull’s work is interesting in
itself, however. It reflects of course the internationalization as well as
professionalization of the discipline from its ‘‘imperial=colonial’’
heartland. The idea of all these five anthropologists being more or
less British by birth or migration is the starting point, not their
destination. A further reconciliation comes through from Turnbull’s
Oxford training and doctoral field site in Africa, both of which were
archetypical of post-Second-World-War U.K. anthropology (Goody
1995). Like Douglas, however, Turnbull’s research was in a Belgian
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territory and thus outside the direct influence of the British Colonial
Office. Additionally, Turnbull’s Scots-Irish identity does come in to
play at times in Grinker’s text, even though we are shown how his
real personal development after his initial immersive fieldwork is
completely tangled up with his New York cosmopolitan lifestyle, his
Virginian retirement home life, and a renewed field persona involving
his partner.
Grinker reminds us many times that Turnbull’s life and ideas were
more often than not ahead of their time. Significant, for those
interested in current material culture studies, is the way Grinker
makes it obvious that Turnbull can be seen as a highly significant
predecessor of this area. His museum curating in New York; his
involvement in the production of the theatrical production of Les Iks;
and the relationship that he helps establish between art=drama and
anthropology are all good examples. Grinker incisively points out the
possible connection to Turnbull’s Oxford training under EvansPritchard
here, whereby anthropology began to be formulated as a
humanities subject which had much more affinity with the arts than
the sciences (p. 235).
Like Van Tilburgh, Grinker also adopts a popular non-academic
style with a number of literary devices to keep the attention of the
average undergraduate. The text is easy to read, with a bounty of
gossip, suspense, and generalizations about the discipline. At times
the story is remarkably captivating in relation to the many debates
that Turnbull was shrouded in. But overall the book comes up short
in terms of the presentation of wider conceptual and theoretical
substance. Grinker nevertheless makes many observations that are
considerably astute, if overtly dilute and lacking in elaborative discursive
context. Early on he suggests that part of Turnbull’s fame
resulted from writing about experiences and feelings that were more
universal than was the case for most of his more traditional,
‘‘scientifically’’ minded colleagues. Yet it is not until the end of the
book that he is even vaguely critical of the fact that Turnbull left little
by way of significant contribution to the theoretical development of
social anthropology or museology. Similar to Van Tilburgh then, this
seems to leave him open to talk about the work of other anthropologists
and anthropological theory in only the vaguest terms:
‘‘Many anthropologists use a concept of universal rights in their
advocacy for immigrants, refugees, and others; many others still
cast a suspicious glance on globalizing concepts like human rights
or ‘development’’’ (p. 186). Names, however, are not given, the
discussion is not pushed further, and we are quickly moved on to
gloss over another topic that is altogether different.
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Further stylistic similarities to Van Tilburgh exist. Here too the
prose is often sensationalistic and superficial, with all sorts of
unsubstantiated pseudo-psychological assumptions about what was
going on in the heads of his protagonists. The following passage from
earlier on the same page is indicative of some of the more banal
interpretations, in this case about the distinct contrast of Turnbull’s
emotive and romantic depiction of the Pygmies which was diametrically
opposed to his alienated and ultimately dystopic portrayal of
the Ik:
Unlike the Pygmies, the Ik failed to empower Colin. Because he could
do little for them the Ik threatened his role as protector or savior.
Because they did not seem to respect him or care for him, the Ik never
gave him the sense of self-worth he derived from Joe and other
underdogs. And because the Ik never gave him someone like Kenge
[his Pygmy key informant] who he could love and idolize, he grew
angry and lonely. The Ik were unlikable to Colin to the end, sadly
unyielding to any Pygmalion-like efforts. [Grinker 2001:186]
Furthermore, the adoption of a populist presentation style means
that Grinker does not provide a comprehensive bibliography or
adequate citations of the archive material he uses. Indeed, source
materials are whimsically and inconsistently found in chapter notes
which are not numbered throughout the text and thus require some
guesswork to follow. For example, chapter 10 starts with an examination
of some controversy surrounding one of Turnbull’s books:
Graham Green praised Michael Korda [Turnbull’s editor] and Colin
for their courage; Margaret Mead called it ‘‘beautiful’’; and reviews in
Life and the New York Times saw the work as a powerful commentary
on the human capacity for evil. Others called it ‘‘unethical’’ or
‘‘dangerous,’’ and in the New York Times Book Review a reviewer
called Colin ‘‘deranged.’’ [p. 155]
Grinker presents no less than six or seven different potential
sources here without citing any of them properly. Where for instance
did Greene praise these people, in church? One does not need to be a
trained historian—let alone a famous architect or novelist1
—to
1
As Greene (1951) himself does in his most personal, semi-autobiographical novel, The End
of the Affair (see also Neil Jordon’s screenplay adaptation, 1999, Columbia Pictures).
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acknowledge that God is indeed in the detail, if not for the sake of
offering supportive evidence then at least as a courtesy to those
readers who might be interested in chasing up any such material.
Surely it is the job of a good biographer, popular or otherwise, to
facilitate such a task.
Additionally, there are certain similarities between Turnbull and
the popular British anthropologist Nigel Barley (1986). Both were
museum curators for some time and for most of their careers
free from some of the responsibilities of many academic positions.
Both have also been incredibly successful authors of accessible
best-seller ‘‘travel literature’’ type books. Along with this fame, they
consequently shared the experience of occasionally being ignored or
subjected to ridicule by more ‘‘conservative’’ professional anthropologists.
Indeed, Turnbull had spoken out on politically sensitive
issues and advocated views that many find unorthodox. Like Albert
Camus (1960), he protested vehemently against capital punishment
during a time when he was conducting research on death row inmates
(chapter 15). Turnbull’s life in terms of the arts, theater, and his
Scottish origins also had its parallels with Victor Turner, who made
an illustrious introduction to the University of Chicago’s anthropology
department in the late 1960s. Grinker, however, makes few
such comparisons or attempts to contextualize Turnbull’s life as a
popular academic, the exceptions being in relation to an analogy he
makes to an eccentric neuroscientist as well as to a few passing
comments about one of Turnbull’s colleagues, Margaret Mead, who
did not seem to have much time for him.
Finally, there is a whole materiality (Hockey 1990) and landscaping
(Laviolette 2003) of death at the end of chapter 16 that is
conceptually bypassed. Here the relationship between the funeral
of Turnbull’s partner Joe Towles and the ideas of symbolic tangibility
as well as the manifestation of various identities (i.e., African=Celtic=
academic=homosexual=married) could have been described in
more length. Grinker recounts this event scrupulously in the ethnographic
vein of thick description. Again, however, he does not
seem to think it worth his while to contextualize the scene into
a wider anthropological discourse about burial and mortuary
ceremonies which he admits was itself of interest to the mourning
protagonist.
Tambiah on Leach
In contrast to the past two texts, Stanley Tambiah’s (2002) account of
his friend and colleague Edmund Leach’s life is considerably erudite
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and occasionally Hermetic. Some critics might suggest that this is too
much the case and that the book offers little personal information
about Leach. Other than for theoretically minded anthropologists
and social historians, it will probably have limited appeal and is likely
to go over the heads of many. Nevertheless, Tambiah provides an
intellectual biography in the truest sense. The book is an outstandingly
exhaustive reading and contextualization of Leach’s
oeuvre within the discipline and British society more generally.
Tambiah begins by postulating the remarkable thesis that Leach’s
life was wholeheartedly anthropological in every respect, despite his
initial training and interests in engineering, mathematics, and all
things pragmatic. From his upbringing in a large, kinship-focused
family to his informal and anecdotal analyses of ritual hierarchy in
university ceremonial processions, Tambiah suggests that Leach’s
inquisitive mind was shaped by, and ultimately helped extensively
shape, a quintessentially anthropological worldview. We are then
shown, once Leach starts his professional career after finishing his
Ph.D., that polemical rhetoric and the setting up of straw-men were
part of his strategy for successful debate. Through such devices he
could overcome the tension between being both structuralist and
functionalist. Owing to a mastery of empirical detail, he would
choose a constant struggle for a middle range approach concerned
with meaning over behavior as well as the need to provide crosscultural
comparisons and ‘‘transcriptions’’ to use his term (HughJones
and Laidlaw 2000).
Although interested in kinship and social structure, and profoundly
influenced by his teachers Malinowski, Firth, and Fortes,
Tambiah charts the trajectory that Leach took away from functional
determinisms towards the structural appeal of linguistic-like models.
He effectively turned his back on the path being paved at the time by
his rival ‘‘Anarchy-Brown’’ which we are shown was riddled with
personal and professional antagonisms. Tambiah therefore demonstrates
that one of Leach’s most significant contributions to social
anthropology was to predominantly help lay the groundwork that
would allow British structural-functionalism to thrive while paradoxically
withdrawing himself somewhat from the intellectual
debates in British social anthropology. He instead preferred to engage
with a wider international dialogue—French structuralism and
American functionalism.
It is at this later point in his career that Leach produced a series of
pieces about biblical materials. In a detailed progression through the
publications and personal communications between Leach and
Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Tambiah digests his protagonist’s attempts to
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elaborate upon the theoretical foundations of structuralism. This
interest in the sociological meanings of religious scriptures is one of
the ways in which some of Leach’s writings closely parallel those of
Mary Douglas. Reading chapter 11, where Tambiah goes through
this material about biblical texts, is a bit like reading The Da Vinci
Code. An elaboration on the symbolic and iconographic nature of
Leach’s interpretations is beyond the scope of this essay, save to note
that he was attempting to overcome the a-historicism of Le´viStrauss’s
structural analyses of myth by emphasizing the ‘‘total ethnographic
context.’’ In this case this refers to the ways in which
cultural meaning grows out of tradition (p. 295).
In his twelfth chapter Tambiah repeats Leach’s motivations for
writing about art and architecture. These were to expose how
Christian doctrine was embedded in the social, and to explore the
cultural backgrounds of belief systems more generally. The author
elaborates upon Leach’s application of contextual structuralist
methods in three case studies from published essays. Tambiah here
uncovers the rather minimal interdisciplinary impact made by Leach
outside anthropology. He concludes the book with three fascinating
chapters that are especially pertinent in terms of directly addressing
the development of social anthropological thought. The 17th and
18th offer glimpses into Leach’s own reassessment of his life’s work
and an examination of his administrative contribution to the
Cambridge College system as the Provost of King’s. Chapter 16,
however, is most highly relevant to us since it chronicles the complex
debate regarding the relationship between British anthropology and
the processes of colonialism. Here Tambiah reviews the influence
upon Leach of subaltern thinkers and postcolonial theorists from a
vast range of sources and perspectives such as Marx, Dumont,
Foucault, and Gramsci. He mounts a densely nuanced if somewhat
apologetic scenario for how Leach fits into the discussions about
re-problematizing the history and current practices of British social
anthropology.
Among the few faults that the book has is its excessive length,
which could have been cut down because of significant repetition.
Tambiah continually lists information such as full titles it the main
body of the text (sometimes several times on the same page) as well as
in the footnotes and again in the bibliography (e.g., p. 319). It is
difficult to see what this adds unless it is a heuristic way of making
the reader remember certain details. Unfortunately, however, it
probably has the reverse effect. One is prone to skim over these
passages quickly, sometimes missing out on some information that
might be relevant but is concealed in the repetition. Also rather
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surprisingly, the prose is often far from elegant. Certain sentences are
incredibly long and convoluted. Given the significance and sophistication
of the topics covered, much of this can be forgiven. But once
one breaches the 300 page mark it does become more than a bit
tiresome and frustrating to work through. The reader will hopefully
indulge one example:
I am introducing this information about Malinowski’s advocacy of
studies of the dynamics of unequal colonial contact in Africa, not only
to problematize the blanket charge of anthropology’s conscious or
unconscious complicity in the Western imperial project, but also to
mute that part of Leach’s own undifferentiated indictment of those
anthropologists of the period of the 1930s to 1950s who are alleged to
have sought to construct a pre-colonial ‘‘traditional’’ tribal society as
a bounded whole, impervious to change before colonial contact,
and=or, when studying the societies during the colonial period, to
ignore or bracket the impact of colonial administrators, missionaries,
and commercial entrepreneurs on their subject peoples. [p. 447]
I have chosen this particular example for several reasons. Principally,
it reveals Tambiah’s ability to go beyond the simple praise of
Leach’s ideas. Instead, he is often willing to critically engage with the
thoughts and writings of the Cambridge don. By questioning the logic
and theoretical developments of his protagonist, Tambiah ultimately
ends up exploring their repercussions in a wider body of social
anthropological knowledge which both men, sometimes in collaboration,
have substantially shaped. The example is equally useful since
it shows that Tambiah’s text is all the more fascinating because Leach
himself was concerned with impacts of politics of class, status and
ethnic origins upon the history of the discipline.
What Leach was therefore perfectly aware of, but given his own
class might have had difficulty reconciling as an internal contradiction,
is the idea that power relations within the anthropological
community are asymmetric. Indeed in his popular public address, A
Runaway World (1968), to which Tambiah dedicates his entire 15th
chapter, the only social anthropologist to date to ever deliver the
BBC’s much acclaimed Reith Lectures reflexively addressed how
those in power intentionally use their status to protect their positions
against rival ones. Such rival positions, he suggests, do not therefore
spring up at random. They can only gain credibility from specific
groups within the community, namely sheltered young newcomers.
In seeking professional recognition these somewhat peripheral
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individuals can potentially advance challenging theoretical developments
since they are not yet fully socialized into the rules of the
dominant paradigm. For this reason Tambiah makes some effort to
show Leach’s benevolence to the next generation of anthropologists
through his involvement with foundations such as the Esperanza
Trust. He even mentions in the first chapter that Leach’s privileged
family had a legacy enmeshed with the foundations of the cooperative
movement.
Fardon on Douglas
Richard Fardon’s 1999 biography is also a sophisticated intellectual
tour de force, on the writings of Dame Mary Douglas. As a West
Africanist and one of her former students, he is well qualified to
produce what is again an enormously rigorous piece of scholarly work
which, as a straightforward biography, would definitely be lacking in
personal detail. Nonetheless like Tambiah, his profound contextual
engagement with Douglas’s research is indicative of the erudite level
that the reflexive history of anthropology can reach. Interestingly in
this sense, like Grinker, Tambiah, and Young have done, Fardon also
situates himself biographically in the preface of the book, offering
important insight into the ways in which ‘‘academic kinship’’ networks
can also exist as coherent disciplinary systems. Indeed, he even
goes a step further by inferring that on occasion social anthropology
can be rather incestuous intellectually—Douglas (1980) writes a
biography of Evans-Pritchard; so does Burton (1992); Fardon reviews
Burton’s book (1993) and writes his own about Douglas.
As a justification for providing an intellectual biography, Fardon
acknowledges the idea of undermining the age-old maxim about
describing the person as a means of understanding his or her work.
Instead he follows the Viennese musician Hans Keller who reversed
this truism to suggest that an in-depth knowledge of the work
explains the person. This holds much truth. We come out from
reading this powerful analysis of Douglas’s research feeling as if we
knew her personally. And since we learn about the extent to which
she had the habitus of a perpetual critic and perfectionist, it is easy to
assume that she herself could never have been one hundred percent
happy with this text, although her abilities to find grounds to fault it
were far superior to mine.
Fardon’s book is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines Douglas’s
Catholic boarding school upbringing, her education at Oxford, and
her initial African fieldwork. Part 2 analyzes and deconstructs her
two most internationally renowned publications. Part 3 looks at her
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post-1970s years in America, away from mainstream British
anthropology, when she ventured into new terrain that dealt with
theories of consumption, risk, and religion. Part 4 analyzes her
conceptual ponderings on social institutions, modernism and Durkheimian
classificatory systems. In examining her early years the
author demonstrates that Douglas’s Catholic exposure at The Sacred
Heart Convent added a dimension of non-spatial universality to her
thinking. It would equally leave lasting impressions on her interests in
symbolism, ritual, institutional hierarchy and security as well as what
he suggests is one of her biggest achievements—helping anthropologists
take seriously the study of Western societies. Analogously
perhaps, his analysis of her regimented educational upbringing has
narrative resonances with the anthropological documentary filmmaker
David MacDougall’s ethnographic series about the Indian
public school system through the five films of The Doon School
Chronicles (1997=2000). Both are accounts of class and normativization,
hence reinforcing the social facets so prominent in the
imperial dimensions of British anthropology.
In examining the training of anthropologists at Oxford, Fardon
makes a similar point about Douglas to Grinker’s about Turnbull by
putting forth the argument that Evans-Pritchard and Franz Steiner’s
influence on Douglas was such that she acquired most of the characteristics
that were archetypical of post-World-War-II British social
anthropology. That is, an African field site and a curiosity about
social structures particularly in terms of the formation of groups
associated with kinship lineages (pp. 40–41). Given this institutional
structuring mechanism of social anthropology at Oxford, the question
thus arises as to why both Grinker and Fardon each omit citing
or mentioning the protagonist of the other’s biography in their own.
In a rather short twenty-odd pages, which are disproportionately
represented by a plate of five fieldwork photographs, Fardon then
looks at Douglas’s research among the Lele. Or rather, he mostly
looks at her study of the Lele, the published outcomes of that work,
elaborating very little on experiential encounters or methodological
strategies for how she went about doing fieldwork. Owing to what is
possibly a lack of letters and similar written archive materials for this
period of her life, it is nonetheless a shame in terms of a reflexive
history towards the process of fieldwork that this episode of initiatory
ethnographic practice is so briefly examined. This must be for me the
only real shortcoming.
The biggest single emphasis of the volume, however, is on the ten
years that allowed Douglas to synthesize the ideas that would become
her consistent theoretical stances and would turn her into an
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international figure. In deconstructing her two most well known
books, Fardon here uses the clever reflexive technique of offering a
‘‘structuralist’’ analysis of Douglas’s own structuralist work and
prose style (p. 84). That is, he gives us a pattern for the way she
formulates her arguments in writing that is recurring and forms
rhetorical foundation. He demonstrates that this is present from the
linking of paragraph passages, all the way through to the way the
overall chapter outline of the book works as a sequence of thesis,
antithesis and dismissal reinforcing initial thesis.
Fardon then goes on to explore Douglas’s attempts to establish
theoretical pillars for supporting the understanding of universal
forms of human behavior as gleaned from comparative methods in
social anthropology. ‘‘The juxtaposition of contemporary and exotic
materials, often but not always African, has become a hallmark of
her work on Western society . . . Douglas’s juxtapositions derive from
her desire to create a genuinely catholic, in the sense of universal,
comparative social anthropology’’ (p. 110). This ethos would fuel an
incredibly diverse and prolific career based on her oft reworked but
generally consistent conceptual grid-group model. Fardon unpacks
its evolution as Douglas applied it to economics and consumption,
risk analysis, religion and ritual, and institutional thought. By
looking at these periods of research in her life, he effectively
demonstrates the multi-dimensionality of grid-group theory whilst
nonetheless providing an overview of the ways in which it has been
contested and opposed.
Such an analysis of the power dynamics at the core and near the
peripheries of academia allows Fardon to address a most germane
issue in terms of a disciplinary reflexive history—situating Douglas
within the wider rubric of British social anthropology’s modernist
movement. He concludes that as an inspirational systems builder she
was destined to travel a liminal path toward recognition. Indeed, the
book shows that in many instances the rationale for her writings has
been to bring various theories and methods of social anthropology to
their logical extremes, revealing ultimate strengths and weaknesses.
This has been Douglas’s vision beyond the applicability of specific
models or frameworks and would undoubtedly be for many the mark
of a true social theorist.
BIO-REFLEXIVITY AND HISTORICAL DISCIPLINARY
SELF-AWARNESS
As is the case with all five volumes, but particularly this last one by
Fardon since it is slightly older, others have of course provided more
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isolated and detailed reviews (e.g., Rousseau 2000). For my purposes
of providing a contextual overview, however, I have not found it
necessary to rehash the same type of analytical discussion about the
specific concepts and theories scrutinized by these biographers. But it
is still important to note the extensive range of variation in intellectual
depth and style between these biographies. This has critical bearing on
the ability to summarize what each adds to the scope of disciplinary
reflexivity. It also has relevance in terms of textual distinction, with
certain advantages as well as disadvantages for their accessibility and
for drawing particular audiences. So as we’ve seen, Van Tilburgh and
Grinker offer very accessible texts whereas Fardon and Tambiah are
at the other extreme, with pieces that are highly challenging. Young’s
book is somewhere in between. A further comparison is that the
biographies by these last three authors venture readily into crosscultural
terrain, the former two largely shun such areas.
All the texts touch on the importance of psychology to biographical
anthropology. Van Tilburgh does this for the obvious
reason of having to deal with the mental illness of her protagonist
Katherine Routledge. For his part, Grinker deals with Turnbull’s
fascination with homosexual physical intimacy in the field and his life
in America generally. Young does so by relating Malinowski’s personal
and professional engagement with Freudian thought. Fardon
and Tambiah deal less with psychological concerns in terms of the
personal analysis of their main characters. Yet they do not fail to
examine the more social and conceptual relationships between psychology
and anthropology by considering how the theoretical aspects
of psychoanalysis influenced the formulations that Douglas and
Leach were making.
Contrarily, only Fardon has any explicit comments about gender
issues even though the gender balance in the texts reflects the early
gender possibilities in the discipline (Wayne-Malinowska 1985).
Camilla Wedgwood’s early if rather stinted career at Cambridge
under Haddon is an example (Lutkehaus 1986). Marett, RadcliffeBrown,
and Evans-Pritchard at Oxford taught a number of female
students including Routledge, Marie Czaplicka, Beatrice Blackwood,
and Barbara Aitken at the turn of the 20th century, and later Douglas
after the Second World War. Kuper (1999) has also recently
chronicled the significant achievements of Audrey Richards and in
his earlier work reminded us that ‘‘the high proportion of women
among Malinowski’s students is noteworthy’’ (1996:67). Differing
from Kuper here, Urry (1992:16) suggests that the presence of
women, Jews and colonials was actually indicative of the marginality
of the discipline in the intellectual world of inter-war Britain.
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Douglas, Leach, Routledge and Turnbull in particular have often
inadvertently made considerable advances in the realm of material
culture. Despite this, none of the biographers explicitly reference or
engage with what has recently been labeled as the new wave of
material culture studies (Buchli 2004). Van Tilburgh does mention
Routledge’s archaeological affiliations and her position of enormous
socio-economic privilege which allowed her to have her own 90-foot
yacht built (the Mana) and to fund her own research expedition to
Easter Island. Grinker highlights Turnbull’s museum curating and
connections with the performing arts while Tambiah dedicates a
chapter to Leach’s writings on the anthropology of art and architecture
as well as referring to his proud commitments as a Trustee of
the British Museum. For his part, Fardon comments on Douglas’s
writings about rites of consumption.
But the real overt examination of the relationship between material
culture and a reflexive disciplinary self-awareness concerning the
ability to carry out research comes through when Grinker, Tambiah,
and Young repeatedly address the financial elements of research and
publication grants, field budgets and salaries. Such implicit Marxist
analyses about the economic dynamics inherent in the production of
knowledge reveal the importance that biographies have in the shaping
of the discipline’s responsibilities and self-awareness.
As we have seen in terms of reflexivity, many authors have shown
that certain correlations exist between an historically specific nexus of
political elites and the propagation of theories that are convenient for
maintaining social segregation. Boissevain (1974) for instance, suggests
that processes operating outside and within the scientific community
eventually forced the turnover of dominant paradigms.
Anthropological theory is therefore no different than any other social
process. He identifies three procedures working toward change within
the scientific community: biological processes, epistemological considerations,
and sociological factors. Increasingly, he sees that
researchers are beginning to examine the birth of social forms. Their
focus is not on the forms per se but on the social processes that create
them. Consequently, they are not asking what social orders consist of
but how they are maintained.
In this respect we must return to Tambiah who has done a superb
job in examining the debates surrounding how and why certain forms
of disciplinary colonialisms have come to exist as they do. Placing
Leach centrally into the debate regarding the levels of potential
complicity for anthropology’s association with colonial and imperial
processes, he goes through certain responses by social anthropologists
to the critical arguments raised by postcolonial or subaltern
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theorists inspired by Said’s Orientalism (1978) such as Fabian in his
classic Time and the Other (1983). Through the reflexive biographical
lens we thus see an example of how paradigm shifts and inter alia
disciplinary challenges can be historically chronicled to reveal that
they are not haphazard mutations.
Due to the shortage of surveys on scholars and their research, this
article has thus pursued the idea that biographies provide historical
reflexive insight on the discipline in the same way that anthropologists
analyze others—in terms of personal values, disciplinary
structures, regional interests, and so forth. Hence, the interpretation
of the texts presented here is itself susceptible to similar examinations
and critiques. I cannot claim an exemption from the values and
interests attributed to colleagues. Burawoy (1991:224) indicates that
‘‘perhaps this vulnerability explains the paucity of research on
research.’’ In truth, however, this is surely a false impediment as the
contemporary interest in academic biographies reveals. Scrutinizing
research far from belittles the legitimacy for doing that work even if it
might question its quality. On the contrary, it often heightens its
credibility. By revealing the complexities and constraints upon academic
study, one can indeed emphasize the significance of such work
as well as stress the importance of a world that still remains ill
understood by the public at large.
CONCLUSIONS
It is no surprise also that biography and reflexivity should become
prominently linked in current social anthropology given that the very
nature of the discipline’s history has consistently been fascinated with
the ancestors and the kinship systems of other cultures (Langam,
1981). Once the argument for the importance of examining our own
societies and disciplinary identities was made, it was only a matter
of time before people started to examine how some of our more
significant founding figures are linked through various networks of
influence. So if we really are witnessing a new trend in the discipline
for biographies of the great and the good, the question remains:
will the autobiography be the next possible stage of development in
our reflexive examination of the life histories of anthropological
ancestors?
Toward the end of his life Leach (1984:22) certainly advocated that
this was necessary for the future prosperity of social anthropology:
‘‘Unless we pay much closer attention than has been customary to the
personal background of the authors of anthropological works, we
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shall miss out on most of what these texts are capable of telling us
about the history of anthropology.’’ We should also infer from the
keeping of extensive diaries, published posthumously of course, that
Malinowski (1967) was endorsing this form. From the writing of a
book structured around a personalized life experience (The Human
Cycle [Turnbull 1983]) and an experimental auto-biography (Lover
and Beloved [Turnbull n.d.]) a similar assumption can be made about
Turnbull, especially through the latter text, which he deeply regretted
not being able to publish (Grinker 2001:258).
It is also noteworthy that the biographical genre is still very much
a single author process. Perhaps this mirrors the individuality
inherent in the nature of ethnographic fieldwork. Yet if we are to
truly reach a reflexive turn in the discipline, social anthropology will
need to consider collaborative efforts and co-edited compilations in
scrutinizing the lives of the ancestors. Obviously a significant
problem here is to convince publishers about this, since multiauthored
compilations seem to have gone out of fashion recently.
We are told that they do not sell. Perhaps this is a reason for the
flourishing publication of biographies, for I fear this new ‘‘trend’’ is
as much driven by an increased concern for reflexive histories as it
is by market forces.
Hero worship sells, even I’m reluctant to suggest, in anthropology
since what is obvious with these five books is that both the
protagonists and the authors are well-established figures. So perhaps
the next trend will be for the biography of biographers (Byatt
2000)? Regardless of such asinine speculations, it is clear that
Fardon, Tambiah and Young in particular have painted vivid
intellectual portraits of a triumvirate of key contributors. Hence,
these texts are more than mere biographies. They are themselves
significant epistemological conceptualizations of how theory and
method intermingle with life history and politics. Indeed, they are
vital and vibrant reflexive symbols for a hundred years of British
social anthropology.
In thinking of biographies as an historical form of disciplinary
autobiography, I was reminded of what Nietzsche wrote in his
foreword to The Antichrist—some people, he says ‘‘are born
posthumously’’ (1895:572). Such a statement rings even more true
through the increased possibility for ancestor worship accorded by
the mythological constructions of anthropological biographies. But
as a point of clarification, most of the scholars depicted in these
biographical accounts were born early enough to be aware of the
significance of their own impact on the intellectual landscape of
anthropology in the United Kingdom.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article is dedicated to the memory of Professor Dame Mary
Douglas (1921–2007) who was kind enough to provide extensive
feedback on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to Adam Kuper, Peter
Loizos, and the two anonymous referees for their prompt and profound
insights as well as to those who attended the University of
Auckland’s Anthropology Department Research Seminar, where I
delivered this paper in September 2007. Finally, for the invitation to
contribute to this special issue of Reviews in Anthropology and his
affable comments, my sincerest thanks to Roger Lohmann.
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