By Stanley R. Barrett
Innovative and infrequently debatable, Barrett's research levels over the full scope of anthropological concept. It offers a clean interpretation of the heritage of conception and mounts an alternate viewpoint, equipped round dialectics, that's eminently appropriate to post-colonial anthropology.
He argues that anthropological concept has didn't be cumulative. it's been characterised through oscillation and repetition - theoretical orientations have seemed and disappeared, simply to be chanced on once more. Addressing various conceptual contradictions that have by no means been resolved, he introduces novel strategies reminiscent of salvage conception and backward idea, and argues that during many respects anthropological conception resembles the structuralists interpretation of myth.
Social lifestyles, he asserts, is inherently contradictory, even supposing hid by means of quite a few mechanisms, so much of which make stronger the established order. Attacking the appearance of simplicity which has ruled positivistic ways and the out-dated identity of anthropology with non-Western, primitive, and tribal societies, Barrett contends that energy and privilege in every single place may be the fundamental issues of anthropological inquiry.
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Extra info for The Rebirth of Anthropological Theory
Example text
At this juncture it is impossible to avoid one of anthropology's fundamental questions: is society dominated by harmony or conflict? This issue is the basis of the most important replication study in the discipline: Lewis's restudy (l95l) of Redfield's Tepoztlan (1930). In a cheeky but penetrating essay, Runciman (1970: 2l) has written that there is no evidence that would prove whether society is primarily harmonious or whether it is rent by strain. The history of anthropology is peppered with polarized and seemingly arbitrary arguments.
It is not that norms and rules don't exist. It is simply that as thinking, feeling, striving creatures, human beings continually manipulate the normative order. In other words, norms are included among the resources available to the actor to be used to further his advantage. An implication is that one cannot explain behaviour simply by erecting a model of the normative order. To do so constitutes a smokescreen; it smooths over the rough edges of everyday behaviour to give it the appearance of order, a theme that will be developed in considerable detail later.
As we know, social change was underplayed during the era of British structural functionalism, and if considered at all was usually tagged on to the end of a monograph. Of major significance was the assumed dominance of one of the subsystems dealt with by British social anthropologists: the kinship system. The general view was that it permeated all other subsystems, and hence was the key to understanding pre-industrial societies. Later we shall see that the central position occupied by the kinship system in pre-industrial societies has proved a challenge to Marxian approaches to anthropology.