ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY pptx

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL
AND CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
Edited by
Alan Barnard
Jonathan Spencer

London & New York
First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York,
NY 10001
First published in paperback 1998
This edition first published 2002
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to
© 1996, 1998, 2002 Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available
from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-45803-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-25684-0 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-28558-5 (Print Edition)
To the memory of Julia Swannell (1952–92)
Editorial board

Maurice Bloch
Ralph Grillo
Signe Howell
Marshall Sahlins
Contents




Acknowledgements

vi


Introduction

vii


How to use this book

x


List of entries

xi


List of contributors

xvii


Analytical table of contents

xxvii


Contributions by author

xxxiii


Entries
1




Biographical appendix

852


Glossary

890


Name index

937


People and places index

975


Subject index

988
Acknowledgements

Many people have helped the editors to bring this volume to completion. The project
itself was first suggested by Mark Barragry of Routledge and, at different times, we have
been ably supported by Michelle Darraugh, Robert Potts and Samantha Parkinson of the
Routledge Reference Section. Friends and colleagues too numerous to mention have
withstood our many casual requests for advice and support, not to mention
contributions—some of which have been provided under heroic pressures of time and
space. Our editorial board has also been a source of sound advice and ideas. The
Department of Social Anthropology in Edinburgh has provided space, calm and, in the
final stages of the work, a smoking laser-printer. At different times we have been helped
there by Francis Watkins, Colin Millard, Sandra Brown and especially Joni Wilson—all
past or present PhD students in the department. Colin Millard and Robert Gibb, together

with the editors, translated contributions from the French. We have been especially
fortunate to work with Alan McIntosh who has brought a rare combination of skill,
patience and good advice to the copy-editing and indexing of this book
The editors have other, more personal debts to acknowledge. For Spencer, Janet
Carsten has been a source of amused tolerance as the project drifted out of control, while
Jessica Spencer gleefully set it all back a few months. Spencer learnt a great deal of what
he knows about lexicography from John Simpson, Yvonne Warburton and Edmund
Weiner of the Oxford English Dictionary. He learnt most, though, about the pleasure of
words and food and many other things, from Julia Swannell.
Barnard would like to thank Joy Barnard for putting up with his mild obsession for the
biographical details of long-dead anthropologists, and for providing strength and the
voice of common sense throughout the long hours the project has required. Corrie and
Buster added the calm atmosphere that only cats can create, while Jake the labrador was
as long-suffering as he was bemused by it all. Barnard has benefited much from
discussions with his students too, especially those in ‘Anthropological Theory’. Their
repeated request for a work of this kind has, we both hope, now been met with a source
that both embodies their inspirations and serves their intellectual desires.
ALAN BARNARD and JONATHAN SPENCER
Edinburgh, January 1996
Introduction

The very idea of an encyclopedia seems eminently anthropological—in at least two
different ways. In its earliest use in classical Rome the term ‘encyclopedia’ referred to the
‘circle of learning’, that broad knowledge of the world which was a necessary part of any
proper education. In its employment in post-Renaissance Europe it has come to refer
more narrowly to attempts to map out systematically all that is known about the world.
Anthropology likes to think of itself as the great encyclopedic discipline, provoking,
criticizing, stimulating, and occasionally chastening its students by exposure to the
extraordinary variety of ways in which people in different places and times have gone
about the business of being human. But anthropology, through most of its 150–year

history as an academic discipline, has also been alternately seduced and repulsed by the
lure of great taxonomic projects to pin down and catalogue human differences.
If anthropology is indeed the most encyclopedic of disciplines, it is not especially
well—served with reference works of its own. This book aims to meet some of the need
for an accessible and provocative guide to the many things that anthropologists have had
to say. It focuses on the biggest and most influential area of anthropology, generally
known as cultural anthropology in North America and social anthropology (or ethnology)
in Europe. By combining ‘social’ and ‘cultural’, the American and the European, in our
title we have tried to indicate our desire to produce a volume that reflects the diversity of
anthropology as a genuinely global discipline. That desire is also shown in the topics we
have covered, from nutrition to postmodernism, incest to essentialism, and above all in
the specialists we have invited to contribute. Inside this book you will find a Brazilian
anthropologist charting the anthropological history of the idea of society, an Indian
reflecting on inequality, two Russians discussing ethnicity and an Australian writing on
colonialism, as well as a systematic set of entries on what anthropologists have had to say
about the lives and cultures of people living in different regions of the world.
The great encyclopedic projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are, with
grand theories of all kinds, rather out of fashion in contemporary anthropology.
Classification, it is widely argued in the humanities and social sciences, is but one form
of ‘normalization’, and even Murray’s great Oxford English Dictionary has been
deconstructed to reveal a meaner project of imperial hegemony lurking beneath its
elaborate Victorian structure. What the world does not need, it seems, is an encyclopedia
which promises the last word and the complete truth on all that anthropologists know.
(And what teachers of anthropology do not need, it might be added, is the prospect of
endless course papers made up of apparently authoritative quotations from such a work.)
Instead of attempting the impossible task of fitting all that our colleagues do into some
final Procrustean schema, we have worked with more modest aims -to help our readers
find their way around a discipline which is far too interesting and important to be left in
the hands of academic specialists.
Since the Second World War, anthropology has grown enormously, and its concerns

are far wider than popular preconceptions about the study of ‘primitive peoples’. There
is, now, an anthropology of capitalism and global consumerism, an anthropology of
gender, an anthropology of war and an anthropology of peace; there is a lot of
anthropology in museums but more and more anthropology of museums; anthropologists
are still interested in the political life of people who live on the margins of the modern
state, but they are also increasingly interested in nationalism and ethnicity and the rituals
and symbols employed by modern politicians at the centre of modern states;
anthropologists are often now employed to advise on development projects, but they have
also started to look at the very idea of ‘development’ as a product of a particular culture
and history, one more way to imagine what it is to be human. Even the idea of the
‘primitive’, it has lately been discovered, tells us rather more about the people who use
the term to describe other people, than it does about the people so described.
Readers should think of this book, then, as a guide and an introduction, a map which
will help them find their way around the anthropological landscape rather than an
authority set up to police what counts as anthropologically correct knowledge about the
world. The readers we have imagined as we worked on the volume include, of course,
students and coileagues in university departments of anthropology around the world; but
they also include students and teachers in other disciplines—history, archaeology,
sociology, psychology, cultural studies among many others—who may feel the need to
come to terms with particular areas of anthropological work. Above all we hope we also
reach all sorts of people who are plain curious about who anthropologists are, what they
do, and what we can learn from them. We hope that all these different kinds of reader
will find material here which stimulates and provokes as well as informs.
Coverage and contributors
In drawing up our headword list we tried to balance a number of considerations.
Obviously we wanted to cover as broad a spectrum of contemporary social and cultural
anthropology as we could, but we were also aware that anthropology is oddly self-
conscious about its own past. Arguments in the present are frequently couched in the
form of revisionist versions of familiar charter myths, and controversies between
contemporaries ritually re-enact the great arguments of the ancestors. Students, in

particular, often find this confusing, knowing little about the collective memory of the
discipline and wondering why they should worry so much about the ancestors. When they
read the ancestors, there is often further confusion—key terms like ‘culture’ or ‘structure’
have shifted meaning over time, while much of the argument at any one time has been
about what exactly we should mean by these terms.
We have, therefore, tried as far as possible to represent the past as well as the present,
both in our choice of headwords for entries, and in our instructions to contributors. But
we have also tried to reflect the fact that anthropology is, as it has always been, a
pluralistic and occasionally fractious discipline. We have not tried to impose an editorial
orthodoxy on our contributors, and we have encouraged all our authors to be explicit
about their own opinions and arguments. The balance in our coverage comes from
combining different points of view, rather than hiding behind some pretence of editorial
distance. (Dismayed students may, at this point, realize that this means they should never
read a single entry; the safe minimum is always to read two on related subjects, but by
different authors.) This makes the choice of contributors as important as the original
choice of headwords. Again we have tried to achieve balance by combining difference:
European, North American, Asian and Australasian; women and men; seasoned scholars
and (we believe) rising stars. Our minimal criteria were simple: each contributor should
be able to write with clarity and authority on the topic in question; and taken together, the
contributors should reflect the different contexts in which anthropology can be found
today.
There was one other important editorial decision that had to be made. Anthropology
involves two kinds of academic work: detailed study of the lives of people in different
social and cultural contexts, based on long-term fieldwork and resulting in that curious
genre known as ethnography; and theoretical and comparative work which draws upon
ethnographic knowledge but seeks to move beyond its particularity. This book, we felt,
needed to give due weight to both sides of the discipline, but this presented us with two
difficulties. Drawing up a list of entries on particular ‘peoples’, ‘tribes’, or ‘ethnic
groups’ seemed inappropriate for all sorts of reasons, even though casual references to
‘Nuer-type’ political organization, or ‘Kachin-style equilibrium’ abound in the literature.

And writing a set of abstract theoretical entries with no reference to the particular
knowledge of particular people on which the discipline is based would be both dull and
misleading. We therefore decided to deal with the first problem by commissioning a set
of entries surveying the regional traditions of ethnographic writing—writing on Southern
Africa, Lowland South America, Southern Europe, and so on. And we decided to
supplement this by encouraging individual authors to use detailed, and sometimes
extended, ethnographic examples wherever appropriate in all the entries.
Other editorial decisions can be discerned in the list of entries. The history of the
discipline is covered in entries on topics like diffusionism and evolutionism, as well as
separate entries on the main national traditions of anthropology—British, French,
American, as well as Indian and East European, divisions which are now beginning to
crumble but which have been important in shaping modern anthropology. There is also an
entry covering writing about the history of anthropology. We have tried to systematically
cover anthropology’s relations with our neighbours in the humanities and social
sciences—linguistics, archaeology, biological anthropology (with cultural anthopology,
the ‘four fields’ of American anthropology), sociology, history, classical studies. After
four years of planning, commissioning, editing and writing, we recognize how dangerous
it would be to claim that this book is complete. We hope, though, that what is here is
enough.
How to use this book

There are three kinds of entry in this encyclopedia.
• The main text is taken up with 231 substantial entries, organized alphabetically, on
important areas of anthropological work. Each of these entries includes a guide to
further reading and cross-references to other related entries.
• At the end of the main text there is a separate section containing short biographical
entries on leading figures who have been important in the development of
anthropology.
• Finally, there is a glossary providing definitions and explanations of technical terms
used in the encyclopedia itself and elsewhere in anthropology.

The choice of headwords is inevitably rather arbitrary—should we look for information
on theories of ritual, or rituals of power under ritual itself, under religion, under the
names of the more important theorists, or even under politics or kingship? We have tried
to make the index as full and explicit as possible, and this is where most readers should
start their search for what they want to know. When they have found the entry that seems
most relevant they should also pay attention to the cross-references to other entries: at the
end of each main entry there is a list of other entries which touch on similar subject
matter; within the text of each entry cross-references are indicated by either an asterisk or
a dagger symbol:
* indicates another main entry
† indicates a name or a term in the biographical appendix or the glossary
In the list of further reading at the end of each entry we encouraged our contributors to
err on the side of economy. Our readers, we felt, did not need a list of everything that had
been written on a particular topic; they needed a selective list of those books and articles
most helpful as an introduction to the topic.
List of entries

Aboriginal Australia
adoption and fostering
aesthetics
Africa: East
Africa: Nilotic
Africa: Southern
Africa: West
age
alliance
American anthropology
Americas: Central
Americas: Latin America
Americas: Native North America

Americas: Native South America (Highland)
Americas: Native South America (Lowland)
ancestors
anthropological societies
archaeology
Arctic
art
Asia: East
Asia: South
Asia: Southeast
avunculate
belief
Big Man
biological anthropology
Boas, Franz
body
British anthropology
Buddhism
cannibalism
capitalism
cargo cult
Caribbean
caste
cattle complex
childhood
Chinese anthropology
Christianity
class
classical studies
classification

cognatic society
cognition
colonialism
community
compadrazgo
comparative method
complementary filiation
complex society
componential analysis
conception, theories of
consumption
cosmology
Crow—Omaha systems
cultural materialism
cultural studies
culture
culture and personality
dance
death
descent
development
diffusionism
discourse
divination
dreams
dual organization
Dutch anthropology
ecological anthropology
economic anthropology
education

emic and etic
Enlightenment anthropology
environment
essentialism
ethnicity
ethnography
ethnopsychiatry
ethnoscience
Europe: Central and Eastern
Europe: North
Europe: South
evolution and evolutionism
exchange
factions
family
feudalism
fieldwork
film
fishing
folklore
food
formalism and substantivism
French anthropology
friendship
functionalism
gender
genealogical method
German and Austrian anthropology
ghost dance
gossip

great and little traditions
Gypsies
Hinduism
history and anthropology
history of anthropology
honour and shame
house
household
hunting and gathering
identity
ideology
incest
Indian anthropology
individualism
inequality
Islam
Japan
joking and avoidance
kingship
kinship
kula
land tenure
landscape
language and linguistics
law
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
literacy
magic
Malinowski, Bronislaw
mana

markets
marriage
Marxism and anthropology
mass media
medical anthropology
memory
menstruation
methodology
Middle East and North Africa
migration
millennial movements, millenarianism
missionaries
mode of production
modernism, modernity and modernization
money
Morgan, Lewis Henry
museums
music
myth and mythology
names and naming
nationalism
nature and culture
network analysis
nomadism
number
nutrition
Occidentalism
oral literature
oratory
Orientalism

Pacific: Melanesia
Pacific: Polynesia
pastoralists
patrons and clients
peasants
person
pilgrimage
play
plural society
poetics
political anthropology
political economy
pollution and purity
possession
postmodernism
potlatch
power
preference and prescription
primitive communism
primitive mentality
property
psychoanalysis
psychological anthropology
race
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R.
rationality
reflexivity
refugees
regional analysis and regional comparison
relationship terminology

relativism
religion
reproductive technologies
resistance
rite of passage
ritual
Russian and Soviet anthropology
sacred and profane
sacrifice
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
scandals, anthropological
science
settlement patterns
shamanism
sharecropping
slavery
social structure and social organization
socialization
society
sociobiology
sociology
state
structuralism
symbolic anthropology syncretism
taboo
technology
time and space
totemism
tourism
transhumance

translation
urban anthropology
violence
war, warfare
witchcraft
work
world system
List of contributors

Prof. Marc Abélès
Laboratory of Social Anthropology
CNRS, Paris, France
Prof. Joseph Agassi
Department of Philosophy
York University, Ontario, Canada
Prof. W.Arens
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA
Prof. Donald W.Attwood
Department of Anthropology
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Prof. Lawrence Babb
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Amherst College, MA, USA
Dr Marcus Banks
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
University of Oxford, UK
Dr Alan Barnard
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Edinburgh, UK

Dr Gerd Baumann
Research Centre Religion and Society
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dr Paul Baxter
Manchester, UK
Dr Barbara Bender
Department of Anthropology
University College London, UK
Prof. Bernardo Bernardi
Rome, Italy
Prof. André Béteille
Department of Sociology
Delhi School of Economics, India
Prof. Maurice Bloch
Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics, UK
Prof. Reginald Byron
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University College Swansea, UK
Dr Jeanne Cannizzo
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Edinburgh, UK
Dr James G.Carrier
Department of Anthropology
University of Durham, UK
Prof. Michael Carrithers
Department of Anthropology
University of Durham, UK
Dr Paul Cartledge
Clare College

University of Cambridge, UK
Prof. H.J.M.Claessen
Department of Anthropology
University of Leiden, Netherlands
Dr Elisabeth Copet-Rougier
Laboratory of Social Anthropology
CNRS, Paris, France
Prof. Thomas Crump
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Prof. Frederick H.Damon
Dept of Anthropology
University of Virginia, USA
Prof. Michael Dietler
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago, USA
Dr Roy Dilley
Department of Social Anthropology
University of St Andrews, UK
Dr Walter Dostal
Institut für Völkerkunde
University of Vienna, Austria
Prof. Dale F.Eickelman
Department of Anthropology
Dartmouth College, Hanover, USA
Prof. Roy Ellen
Eliot College
University of Kent, UK
Dr Richard Fardon
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
School of Oriental and African Studies,

London, UK
Prof. James Ferguson
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Irvine, USA
Prof. Ruth Finnegan
Faculty of Social Sciences
The Open University, UK
Prof. Robin Fox
Department of Anthroplogy
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
Dr Sarah Franklin
Department of Sociology
University of Lancaster, UK
Prof. C.J.Fuller
Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics, UK
Prof. John G.Galaty
Department of Anthropology
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Dr David N.Gellner
Department of Human Sciences
Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
Prof. Thomas Gibson
Department of Anthropology
University of Rochester, USA
Dr Lisa Gilad
Immigration and Refugee Board
St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
Prof. André Gingrich
Institut für Völkerkunde

University of Vienna, Austria
Dr Anthony Good
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Edinburgh, UK
Prof. Ralph Grillo
AFRAS
University of Sussex, UK
Prof. Stephen Gudeman
Department of Anthropology
University of Minnesota, USA
Prof. Ørnulf Gulbrandson
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Bergen, Norway
Prof. C.M.Hann
Eliot College
University of Kent, UK
Prof. Judith Lynne Hanna
University of Maryland, USA
Prof. Ulf Hannerz
Department of Social Anthropology
Stockholm University, Sweden
Dr Simon Harrison
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology
University of Ulster, UK
Dr Penelope Harvey
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester, UK
Prof. Michael Herzfeld
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

Prof. Signe Howell
Department and Museum of Anthropology
University of Oslo, Norway
Dr Mary Tylor Huber
Carnegie Fund for Advancement of Teaching
Princeton University, USA
Prof. I.C.Jarvie
Department of Philosophy
York University, Ontario, Canada
Dr M.C.Jedrej
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Edinburgh, UK
Prof. R.S.Khare
Department of Anthropology
University of Virginia, USA
Prof. Victor T.King
Centre for Southeast Asian Studies
University of Hull, UK
Prof. Ann E.Kingsolver
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Dr Chris Knight
University of East London, UK
Prof. Henrika Kuklick
Department of History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Prof. Michael Lambek
Department of Anthropology, Scarborough College
University of Toronto, Canada
Dr Helen Lambert

Department of Public Health and Public Policy
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK
Prof. Robert Layton
Department of Anthropology
University of Durham, UK
Prof. John Leavitt
Département d’Anthropologie
University of Montreal, Canada
Dr Pierre Lemonnier
CNRS
Marseilles, France
Prof. I.M.Lewis
Department of Social Anthropology
London School of Economics, UK
Prof. Lamont Lindstrom
Department of Anthropology,
University of Tulsa, USA
Prof. Roland Littlewood
Department of Anthropology
University College London, UK
Prof. Kenneth Maddock
School of Behavioural Sciences
Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia
Dr Marit Melhuus
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Oslo, Norway
Dr Jon P.Mitchell
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Edinburgh, UK
Dr Stephen Nugent

Department of Anthropology
Goldsmiths College, London, UK
Dr Frances Pine
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge, UK
Dr Johan Pottier
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK
Dr Aparna Rao
Institut für Völkerkunde,
University of Cologne, Germany
Dr Nigel Rapport
Department of Social Anthropology
University of St Andrews, UK
Dr Claudia Barcellos Rezende
Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences
University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Dr David Riches
Department of Social Anthropology
University of St Andrews, UK
Prof. Dan Rose
Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Prof. Bernard Saladin d’Anglure
Department of Anthropology
Université Laval, Cité Universitaire, Québec, Canada
Prof. Philip Carl Salzman
Department of Anthropology
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Prof. Roger Sanjek

Department of Anthropology
Queens College, City University of New
York, USA