Companion encyclopedia anthropology

COMPANION ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF ANTHROPOLOGY



COMPANION
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF
ANTHROPOLOGY
EDITED BY

TIM INGOLD

London and New York


First published in 1994
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003,
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge, Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Structure and editorial matter © 1994 Tim Ingold
The chapters © 1994 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 Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available on request.
ISBN 0-203-03632-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19104-8 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-02137-5 (Print Edition)


CONTENTS
Preface
General introduction
Tim Ingold
The contributors

ix
xiii
xxiii
1

PARTI: HUMANITY
1.

Introduction to humanity
Tim Ingold
2. Humanity and animality
Tim Ingold
3. The evolution of early hominids
Phillip VTobias
4. Human evolution: the last one million years
Clive Gamble

5. The origins and evolution of language
Philip Lieberman
6. Tools and tool behaviour
Thomas Wynn
7. Niche construction, evolution and culture
F.Jf. Odling-Smee
8. Modes of subsistence: hunting and gathering to agriculture
and pastoralism
Roy Ellen
9. The diet and nutrition of human populations
Igor de Garine
10. Demographic expansion: causes and consequences
Mark N. Cohen
11. Disease and the destruction of indigenous populations
Stephen jf. Kun itz

14
33
79
108
133
162

197
226
265
297
327

PART II: CULTURE

12.

3

Introduction to culture
Tim Ingold

329
V


CONTENTS

13. Why animals have neither culture nor history

14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

David Premack and Ann James Premack
Symbolism: the foundation of culture

Mary LeCron Foster
Artefacts and the meaning of things
Daniel Miller
Technology
Frangois Sigaut
Spatial organization and the built environment
Amos Rapoport
Perceptions of time
Barbara Adam
Aspects of literacy
Brian VStreet and Niko Besnier
Magic, religion and the rationality of belief
Gilbert Lewis
Myth and metaphor
James F Weiner
Ritual and performance
Richard Schechner
The anthropology of art
Howard Morphy
Music and dance
Anthony Seeger
The politics of culture: ethnicity and nationalism
Anthony D.Smith

PART III: SOCIAL LIFE

350
366
396
420

460
503
527
563
591
613
648
686
706
735

26. Introduction to social life
Tim Ingold
27. Sociality among humans and non-human animals
R.I.M.Dunbar
28. Rules and prohibitions: the form and content of human
kinship
Alan Barnard
29. Understanding sex and gender
Henrietta L.Moore
30. Socialization, enculturation and the development of personal
identity
Fitz John Porter Poole
31. Social aspects of language use
Jean DeBernardi
32. Work, the division of labour and co-operation
Sutti Ortiz
VI

737

756

783
813

831
861
891


CONTENTS

33.

34.
35.
36.
37.
38.

Exchange and reciprocity
C.A. Gregory
Political domination and social evolution
Timothy Earle
Law and dispute processes
Simon Roberts
Collective violence and common security
Robert A.Rubinstein
Inequality and equality
Andre Beteille

The nation state, colonial expansion and the contemporary
world order
Peter Worsley

Index

911
940
962
983
1010

1040
1067

Vll



PREFACE
This volume started life on the initiative of Jonathan Price, at that time Reference
Books Editor at Croom Helm. His idea was for an Encyclopedia of Human Society
whose subject would span the disciplines of anthropology, sociology and archaeology.
We first met to discuss the project in August 1986, and it was then that he charmed me
into agreeing to become the volume's editor. It has been a big job, to put it mildly. In
hindsight, it seems to me that I must have been mad to take it on at all, let alone singlehanded. No doubt my motives were in part honourable, since I was strongly committed
to the idea of anthropology as a bridging discipline, capable of spanning the many
divisions of the human sciences. I wanted to prove that the possibility of synthesis
existed not just as an ideal, but as something that could be realized in practice. No
doubt, too, I was motivated by a certain vanity: if a synthesis was to be built, I wanted

to be the one to build it, and to reap the credit! Seven years on, I am both older and
perhaps a little wiser—no less committed to the ideal of synthesis, but a great deal more
aware of the complexities involved, and rather less confident about my own abilities to
bring it about.
Following my initial meeting with Jonathan Price, over a year passed before I was
able to begin serious work on the project, which we had decided to call Humanity,
Culture and Social Life. In October 1987 I drew up a prospectus for the entire volume,
which included a complete list of forty articles, divided between the three parts spelled
out in the title, and a rough breakdown of the contents for each. Then, during the first
half of 1988, I set about recruiting authors for each of the articles. Meanwhile, Croom
Helm had been subsumed under Routledge, from whose offices Jonathan continued to
oversee the project.
My original schedule had been for authors to write their first drafts during 1989,
allowing a further nine months for consultation and editorial comment, with a deadline
for final versions of September 1990 and a projected publication date of April 1992.
As always, things did not go entirely according to schedule, and I soon found that I
was receiving final drafts of some articles while a pile of first drafts of others were
awaiting editorial attention, and while for yet others I was still trying to fill the gaps in
my list of contributors. To my great embarrassment, I found that I was quite unable to
keep to my own deadlines. The inexorable growth of other commitments meant that
drafts,
IX


PREFACE

dutifully submitted by their authors at the appointed time, languished for many
months—and in some cases for more than a year—before I could get to work on them.
During the academic year 1990-1, pressures of teaching and administration, coupled
with my assumption of the Editorship of the journal Man, grew so heavy that progress

on the project more or less ground to a halt, and my deadline for submitting the whole
volume to the publishers—set for the end of April, 1991—passed quietly by with most
of the articles still at the first draft stage.
The project was rescued by my good fortune in securing one whole year and two
subsequent terms of research leave from the University of Manchester. The first year
(1991-2) was made possible in part by a grant from the University of Manchester
Research Support Fund, for which I acknowledge my profound thanks. The two
following terms were taken as sabbatical leave, and I should like to thank all my
colleagues in the Manchester Department of Social Anthropology for covering my
teaching and administrative duties in my absence. Shortly before his departure from
Routledge to join the staff at Edinburgh University Press, the ever-patient Jonathan
Price was finally rewarded for his forbearance. At noon on 14 October 1992, he arrived
in my office to collect the entire, edited manuscript, and to carry it off to London. I had
completed work on the manuscript only two hours before! But the editorial
introductions had still to be written, and it was not until well into the following spring
that they were eventually finished. Meanwhile, Mark Hendy was hard at work on the
Herculean task of sub-editing the whole volume, which he completed by the beginning
of May. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his efforts. Since Jonathan left for Edinburgh,
responsibility for guiding the volume through the press passed to Michelle Darraugh,
who has been wonderfully supportive, efficient and understanding. Most of all,
however, this book belongs to Jonathan, without whom it would never have been
conceived in the first place, and whose unflagging enthusiasm kept the project on the
rails even during the most difficult of times.
Looking back, I am surprised how closely the book, in its final form, resembles the
original plan drawn up so many years ago. Only four of the projected articles have been
lost, and the titles and ordering of the majority have been changed little, if at all. There
have been a few changes in the list of contributors along the way: in particular, I should
like to put on record the sad loss of John Blacking, who died before he could begin
work on his projected article, 'Music and dance'; and I should also like to thank
Anthony Seeger for stepping into the breach at very short notice. There have also been

some changes in the volume's title. All along, I wanted it to be a book to be read, and
not merely consulted as a work of reference, and for that reason I was inclined to
relegate the phrase An Encyclopedia of Anthropology to the subtitle. In many ways, the
book is more akin to what might conventionally be called a handbook or a reader,
rather than an encyclopedia. Be that as it may, after much discussion it was eventually
decided to call it a Companion Encyclopedia, a
x


PREFACE

phrase which nicely combines the notion of encompassing a whole field of knowledge
with that of guiding and accompanying the reader in his or her journey through it. The
original working title, Humanity, Culture and Social Life, accordingly became the
volume's subtitle.
I would like to take this opportunity to extend my personal thanks to all the many
contributors to this book. They have put up patiently with endless delays, and
responded graciously to my many and sometimes inordinate editorial demands. I have,
moreover, learned a tremendous amount from working through their articles. But for
maintaining my sanity over all these years, my greatest debt of gratitude is to my wife,
Anna, and my children, Christopher, Nicholas and Jonathan. Their support has been
magnificent, and it is not something that I shall ever be able to repay.
Tim Ingold
Manchester
September 1993

XI

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

THE SCOPE OF ANTHROPOLOGY
Anthropologists study people. They do not study stars, rocks, plants or the weather. But
whilst we may have little difficulty in separating out the field of anthropological
inquiry from those of astronomy, geology, botany or meteorology, it is not so obvious
how—if at all—anthropology may be distinguished from the many other branches of
the human sciences, all of which could claim to be studying people in one way or
another. Medicine is concerned with the workings of the human body, psychology with
those of the mind; history studies people's activities in the past, sociology their
institutional arrangements in the present, and so on. The list could be extended almost
indefinitely. What, then, is the distinctively anthropological way of studying people?
Part of the difficulty we have in answering this question is attributable to the fact
that there is not one way of doing anthropology, but many. There are two facets to this
diversity, the first having to do with the circumstances of the discipline's historical
development, the second lying in its contemporary subdisciplinary divisions. I begin
with a few words about anthropology's history.
In a sense, of course, anthropology can be traced to the earliest antiquity, when
human beings first began to speculate about their own nature, origins and diversity. But
as an explicitly defined field of academic inquiry, it is a creature of the last two
centuries of thought in that region of the world conventionally known as 'the West'.
Western thought, however, is not a monolithic edifice but a complex interweaving of
often opposing currents, and this is no less true of the career of anthropology.
Moreover, these currents did not flow in an historical vacuum, but at every moment
responded to dominant moral, political and economic concerns of the time. Thus
British anthropology developed alongside the growth of empire; its preoccupations
were fuelled by the need of the colonial administration to take the measure of its
presumed superiority over administered nations, and to turn a knowledge of their social
organizations and cultural traditions to the service of indirect rule. In many countries of
Continental Europe, by contrast, the growth of anthropology (more commonly

xm


GENERAL INTRODUCTION

known as 'ethnology') was linked to emergent nationalist movements of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the efforts, on the part of adherents of
each movement, to discover a national heritage in the traditions of local folk or peasant
culture. In North America the situation was different again: the United States and
Canada had their indigenous Indian populations, and the first priority of many
American anthropologists was to record as much as possible about the physical
features, material artefacts, languages and cultures of extant Amerindian groups before
it was too late. This was a kind of salvage anthropology.
The second facet to the diversity of anthropological approaches lies in the fact that
anthropology, as it exists today, is not a single field, but is rather a somewhat
contingent and unstable amalgam of subfields, each encumbered with its own history,
theoretical agenda and methodological preoccupations. In the American tradition of
scholarship, it has long been customary to distinguish four such subfields of
anthropology, namely physical, archaeological, cultural and linguistic. In the British
tradition, by contrast, there are only three subfields, of physical anthropology,
archaeology and social (rather than cultural) anthropology. The exclusion of linguistics
from British anthropology is a curious and somewhat scandalous anomaly to which I
return below. The more immediate question is: why these fields in particular? What
brought the study of physical types, ancient artefacts and supposedly 'primitive' ways
of life under the umbrella of a single discipline of anthropology?
Most academic disciplines and their boundaries are, in fact, the fossilized shells of
burnt-out theories, and in this, anthropology is no exception. The theory which, more
than any other, established anthropology as a comprehensive science of humankind
held that people the world over are undergoing a gradual, evolutionary ascent from
primitive origins to advanced civilization, and that the differences between societies

can be explained in terms of the stages they have reached in this progression.
Anthropology, then, emerged as the study of human evolution—conceived in this
progressive sense—through the reconstruction of its earlier stages. Physical
anthropology studied the evolution of human anatomy, archaeology studied the
evolution of material artefacts, and social and cultural anthropology studied the
evolution of beliefs and practices—on the assumption that the ways of life of
contemporary 'primitives' afford a window on the former condition of the more
'civilized' nations.
In short, it was progressive evolutionism that unified the study of human anatomy,
artefacts and traditions as subfields of a single discipline. Yet this kind of evolutionary
theory belongs essentially to the formative period of anthropology in the nineteenth
century and is, today, almost universally discredited. So what, if anything, still holds
the sublfields together? To the extent that contemporary anthropologists concern
themselves with this question, their opinions differ greatly. Some argue that their
continued
xiv


GENERAL INTRODUCTION

combination, for example within University Departments, is an anachronism for which
there is no longer any rational justification. Thus many cultural anthropologists,
concerned as they are with the manifold ways in which the peoples among whom they
have worked make sense of the world around them, find more common ground with
students of philosophy, language, literature and the arts than with their colleagues in
other fields of anthropology. Social anthropologists, who would regard their project as
a comparative study of the generation, patterning and transformation of relationships
among persons and groups, profess a close affinity—amounting almost to identity—to
sociologists and historians, but have little time for archaeology (despite the obvious
links between archaeology and history). For their part, physical anthropologists (or

'biological anthropologists', as many now prefer to be known) remain committed to the
project of understanding human evolution, but their evolutionary theory is of a modern,
neo-Darwinian variety, quite at odds with the progressive evolutionism of the
nineteenth century. Having vigorously repudiated the racist doctrines of the turn of the
century, which cast such a shadow over the early history of the discipline,
anthropologists of all complexions now recognize that social and cultural variation is
quite independent of biogenetic constraint. Thus physical anthropology, cut loose from
the study of society and culture, has virtually become a subfield of evolutionary
biology, devoted specifically to the evolution of our own kind.
Yet despite these tendencies towards the fragmentation of anthropology, along the
lines of the heavily institutionalized division of academic labour between the
humanities and social sciences on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other,
many anthropologists remain convinced that there is more to their discipline than the
sum of its parts. What is distinctive about the anthropological perspective, they argue,
is a commitment to holism, to the idea that it should be possible—at least in
principle—to establish the interconnections between the biological, social, historical
and cultural dimensions of human life that are otherwise parcelled up among different
disciplines for separate study. It was, of course, just such a synthesis that the nineteenth
century founders of anthropology claimed to have achieved with their theory of
evolution. But the fact that the theory is now judged, in hindsight, to have been wrong
does not mean that the project that gave rise to it was entirely misconceived (although
aspects of it—such as its assumption of Euro-American superiority and its racist
undertones—undoubtedly were). My own view, which also furnishes the rationale for
the present volume, is that a synthesis of our knowledge of the conditions of human life
in the world, in all its aspects, is something worth striving for, and that working
towards such a synthesis is the essence of doing anthropology.
The obstacles, however, are formidable. Biological and cultural anthropologists, for
example, are divided not simply by their attention to different kinds of facts, but by a
more fundamental difference in their respective understandings of the relations
between fact and theory. True, the

xv


GENERAL INTRODUCTION

data of observation in every branch of anthropology have one thing in common: they
are not derived by experiment, but are gathered through the conduct of fieldwork. But
ethnographic fieldwork, as it is carried out by social and cultural anthropologists in the
settings of everyday life, is very different from the kind of fieldwork that might be
conducted by an archaeologist or physical anthropologist in searching, say, for the
fossilized remains of early hominids or for evidence, in the form of preserved artefacts,
of their activities. Fossils and artefacts can be treated, to all intents and purposes, as
inert objects of investigation: they may be examined for every ounce of information
they will yield, but they are not themselves party to its interpretation. Living people,
however, cannot be treated as objects in this sense. In the field, ethnographers engage
in a continuous dialogue with their informants, who provide instruction in the skills and
knowledge that are entailed in their particular form of life. It has been said, with some
justification, that ethnographers do not so much study people, as go to study among or
with people, and the results of such study emerge as the products of this mutual,
dialogic encounter. Indeed much so-called 'ethnographic data' is in fact
autobiographical, describing the ways in which the fieldworker experienced those
events in which he or she participated.
Under these circumstances, a clear distinction between observation and
interpretation, between the collection of data in the field and their placement within a
theoretical framework, cannot readily be sustained. This did not, however, prevent the
first generation of British social anthropologists— pioneers of the kind of long-term,
intensive field study that is now considered indispensable to competent ethnographic
work—from pretending that it could, apparently in an effort to secure recognition for
their discipline as a true science of society. This goes some way to explaining the
curious neglect, by social anthropologists of this generation, of language and its uses.

Knowledge of the native language was considered a prerequisite for ethnographic
inquiry; as such, however, it was regarded as a tool of the anthropologist's trade rather
than something to be investigated in its own right. One was to use language to probe
the details of culture and social organization much as a botanist uses a microscope to
examine the fine structure of plants. Only subsequently, as anthropologists became
more reflexive, more sensitive to the epistemological conditions of their own inquiry,
did language use re-emerge as a key focus of attention. Even in North America, where
linguistic anthropology has always occupied its place among the four subfields of the
discipline, its practitioners have long been in the minority, often drawn into the
anthropological camp through their reaction against the excessive formalism of
mainstream linguistics, and its insensitivity to the social and cultural contexts in which
language is put to work.
But the challenge posed by ethnographic study among people whose backgrounds
and sensibilities are situated in environments very different from those of the 'West'
goes far beyond showing how the seemingly strange or irrational 'makes sense' when
placed in its proper context. For the knowledge
xvi


GENERAL INTRODUCTION

and wisdom that these people impart to the fieldworker, sharpened as it is by their
practical experience of everyday involvement in the world, strikes at the heart of some
of the most basic presuppositions of Western thought itself. To take this knowledge
seriously, and to be the wiser for it, means bringing it to bear in a critical engagement
with these presuppositions. In this engagement, every single one of the key concepts of
Western civilization—concepts like society, culture, nature, language, technology,
individuality and personhood, equality and inequality, even humanity itself—becomes
essentially contestable. Theoretical work, in social and cultural anthropology, is largely
a matter of opening up these concepts for inspection and unpacking their contents,

thereby revealing the often hidden baggage that we carry with us into our encounters
with unfamiliar realities. If we are ever to reach a level of understanding that breaks the
barriers between Western and non-Western worlds of life and thought, such work is
indispensable. Yet it also leaves anthropology perilously poised on a knife-edge. For
how can a discipline whose project is rooted in the intellectual history of the Western
world meet the challenge presented by non-Western understandings of humanity,
culture and social life without undercutting its own epistemological foundations?
Perhaps uniquely among academic disciplines, anthropology thrives on the art of its
own perpetual deconstruction. Caught at the intersection of two cross-cutting tensions,
between the humanities and natural sciences on the one hand, and between theoretical
speculation and lived experience on the other, it leaves little room for intellectual
complacency. Like philosophy, the remit of anthropology is not confined to a delimited
segment within a wider division of academic labour; rather it exists to subvert any such
tidy division, rendering problematic the very foundations on which it rests. The best
anthropological writing is distinguished by its receptiveness to ideas springing from
work in subjects far beyond its conventional boundaries, and by its ability to connect
these ideas in ways that would not have occurred to their originators, who may be more
enclosed by their particular disciplinary frameworks. But to this connecting enterprise
it brings something more, namely the attempt to engage our abstract ideas about what
human beings might be like with an empirically grounded knowledge of (certain)
human beings as they really are, and of what for them everyday life is all about. This
engagement not only provides the primary motivation—apart from that of sheer
curiosity—for ethnographic inquiry, but also carries anthropology beyond the closeted
realms of speculative philosophy. Anthropology, if you will, is philosophy with the
people in.
No more today than in the past, however, is anthropological work conducted in an
historical vacuum. Just as much as the people they study, anthropologists are
participants in the one world which we all inhabit, and therefore carry their share of the
responsibility for what goes on in it. In many parts of the world, people currently face
appalling deprivations, whether due to poverty, famine, disease, war, or some

combination of these. There is no doubt that anthropological knowledge, tempered as it
is by an awareness of the practical
xvn


GENERAL INTRODUCTION

realities of life 'on the ground' in real human communities, has a vital contribution to
make in the alleviation of human suffering. Moreover, to an increasing extent,
anthropologists have involved themselves as advocates on behalf of the peoples among
whom they have worked—for example in the struggle for recognition of indigenous
rights to land—or as advisers or consultants in various projects of development. In
view of such involvements, it has sometimes been suggested that a field of 'applied
anthropology' should be recognized, alongside those branches of the discipline that are
already well established.
If this suggestion has not met with wholehearted approval, the reason does not lie in
any desire to keep anthropology 'pure', nor does it indicate that anthropologists prefer
to wash their hands of the moral and political entailments of their involvement with
local communities. It is rather that in the conduct of anthropological work it is
practically impossible to separate the acquisition of knowledge from its application.
The distinction between pure and applied science rests on a premiss of detachment, the
assumption that scientists can know the world without having to involve themselves in
it. But anthropology rests on exactly the opposite premiss, that it is only by immersing
ourselves in the life-world of our fellow human beings that we shall ever understand
what it means to them—and to us. Thus whatever else it may be, anthropology is a
science of engagement. Indeed it may be said that in anthropology we study ourselves,
precisely because it requires us to change our conception of who 'we' are, from an
exclusive, Western 'we' to an inclusive, global one. To adopt an anthropological
attitude is to drop the pretence of our belonging to a select association of Westerners,
uniquely privileged to look in upon the inhabitants of 'other cultures', and to recognize

that along with the others whose company we share (albeit temporarily), we are all
fellow travellers in the same world. By comparing experience—'sharing notes'—we
can reach a better understanding of what such journeying entails, where we have come
from, and where we are going.
HUMANITY, CULTURE AND SOCIAL LIFE
This is an encyclopedia of anthropology, it is not an encyclopedia about anthropology.
The distinction is critical, and underwrites both the content of the articles that follow
and the structure of the volume as a whole. There is a tendency, common to many
branches of scholarship, for specialists to become so absorbed in debates internal to the
discipline that they lose sight of their original purpose, namely to extend the scope of
our knowledge of the world. The debates become an object of study in themselves.
Though there must be a place in every discipline for a consideration of its history and
its methods, I believe it is important to resist the inclination to detach such
consideration from the primary objective of enlarging human understanding. In the
case of anthropology, this means that however much we may tangle with the details of
xvin


GENERAL INTRODUCTION

particular arguments, we should never forget that the pursuit of anthropological
knowledge is for the benefit of people, and not the other way round. The tapestry of
human life, in other words, has not been woven for the purpose of providing research
opportunities for anthropologists; however, anthropological research can help us to
unravel the strands and to reveal the subtleties of their patterning. This volume, then, is
about human life in all its aspects, and each article, focusing on some specific aspect,
sets out what current studies in anthropology (and in several cases, in contingent
disciplines) have to say about it.
The same principle informs the division of the volume into its three parts,
respectively entitled 'humanity', 'culture' and 'social life'. The emphasis, in the first, is

on human beings as members of a species, on how that species differs from others, on
how it has evolved, and on how human populations have adapted to—and in turn
transformed—their environments. The second part focuses on the origination,
structure, transmission and material expression of the symbolically constituted forms of
human culture, and on the role of culture in action, perception and cognition. The third
part examines the various facets—familial, economic, political, and so on—of the
relationships and processes that are carried on by persons and groups, through the
medium of cultural forms, in the historical process of social life. Each part begins with
an introductory article that sets out the substantive areas to be covered in greater depth,
and places the articles that follow in their wider anthropological context.
Of course any division of the entire field of human life is bound to be artificial, and
there are perhaps as many common themes linking articles in different parts as within
each part of the volume. The point I wish to stress, however, is that the division is not
based on, nor does it correspond with, any of the conventional divisions of the field of
anthropology. It is true that the work of archaeologists and physical (or biological)
anthropologists figures relatively prominently in the first part, and that work in cultural
and social anthropology predominates in the second and third parts. But if there is one
thing that the volume establishes, beyond any reasonable doubt, it is that the issues of
our common humanity, of cultural variation and of social process can be adequately
tackled only through the collaboration of scholars working in all the conventional
subfields of anthropology—biological, archaeological, cultural, social, linguistic—and
of others besides, whose backgrounds lie in fields as diverse as medicine, ecology,
psychology, cognitive science, history, sociology, comparative religion, political
science, law, philosophy, architecture, drama, folklore and ethnomusicology. Indeed,
practitioners of several of these latter fields number among the contributors to this
book.
To attempt to compress all of human life within two covers may seem a hopelessly
ambitious undertaking. For every topic included in the contents, a thousand others
could have been selected; for every discussion of a given topic, a thousand others
could have been presented, each drawing on different material and with a different

orientation. Though the overall conception of the
xix


GENERAL INTRODUCTION

volume—including the definition of issues to be covered by individual articles, their
ordering and arrangement into parts—is my own, contributors have been given a free
hand to develop their ideas along whatever lines they find most productive and
congenial. The result is something of a pot-pourri of approaches which, whilst they
may accurately reflect the diversity of voices currently to be heard within the
discipline, hardly add up to any consistent direction. So what possible justification can
there be for collecting them all together under the grandiose and all-encompassing
rubric of an Encyclopedia} To my mind, there are three good reasons for doing so.
The first, and most important, is to counteract the dangers of overspecialization.
One of the more worrying consequences of the exponential growth in the volume of
research and publication during the latter part of this century is that we know more and
more about less and less. It is hard enough for any scholar to keep abreast of
developments within a relatively narrow field, let alone to follow what is going on in
even closely related specialisms. What is lost, in this process, is an awareness of the
interconnectedness of phenomena, of their positioning within wider fields of
relationships. Knowledge is fragmented, its objects treated in isolation from the
contexts in which they occur. Yet it is only thanks to our ability to connect that
knowledge is rendered significant. Thus, paradoxically, does the growth of knowledge
breed ignorance, for the more we know, the less we understand of what that knowledge
means. Despite its holistic aspirations, anthropology has suffered its own
fragmentation, which some indeed have welcomed as testimony to the rapid advance of
anthropological scholarship in recent years, on a wide range of fronts. Gone are the
days, it is said, when anthropologists could read and contribute—as did the founders of
the discipline—across the entire spectrum of its concerns. I do not personally believe

this is the case, and if it is, I certainly do not welcome it. But there is no doubt that the
proliferation of interests and approaches threatens the coherence of anthropology as a
discipline, and that the need for integration and synthesis is urgent. This volume exists
to meet that need.
The second reason for an encyclopedic compilation of this kind is that it serves to
establish a baseline of anthropological knowledge upon which subsequent generations
can build. This is not merely to embark on a stocktaking exercise, a survey of
achievements to date in the various areas covered. Indeed, little is to be gained from
attempts to recapitulate or paraphrase all that has been written on this or that topic: to
do so leads at best to the sterile rehearsal of obsolete arguments, at worst to the
contrivance of artificial 'schools of thought', each of which then becomes the subject of
a separate story. Contributors to this volume were asked not to write articles of this
sort, but were rather challenged to break new ground, not only by presenting their own
versions of the 'state of play' in their respective fields of study, but by charting out new
directions of inquiry hitherto unexplored. They have, without exception, risen to the
challenge, and the result is a volume that takes anthropology beyond existing frontiers
and that points unequivocally and
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

sometimes provocatively towards the future. Many contributors, moreover, deal with
issues that lie on the evolving interface between anthropology and other disciplines in
the human sciences, from biology and psychology to linguistics, history and sociology,
and herein lies the third raison d'etre for the volume. For besides bringing out the
connections within the discipline of anthropology, the articles collected here amply
demonstrate the relevance of anthropological insights to work in a host of related
fields, and the capacity of the discipline to build bridges across the frontiers between
otherwise divided and mutually impenetrable intellectual territories.

Let me conclude with a few words about what this Encyclopedia is not. I have
already pointed out that its subject is not anthropology but human life, and that its
orientation is to the future rather than the past. For this reason, there are no articles
dealing specifically with the history of anthropology. This is not to say that no space is
devoted to historical themes. However it has been left to the discretion of individual
contributors to dwell on the history of approaches to the topical issues that concern
them, in so far as it is conducive to the elucidation of these issues themselves. The
emphasis, in other words, is on learning from the history of the discipline rather than
on learning about it. The same goes for questions of anthropological research method.
With the reformulation of such questions as problems of 'methodology', they have
tended to become objects of investigation in their own right, rather than questions
whose resolution is but a means to the greater goal of enlarging human understanding.
In this volume, matters of method are not made into the subjects of separate articles,
but are rather introduced where they belong, in the context of inquiries into substantive
anthropological topics. Finally, this is an encyclopedia of anthropology, not of
ethnography. It does not aim to catalogue the range of human cultural variation, or to
review the findings of anthropological research in particular regions of the world. Each
article has a thematic rather than a regional focus, and authors have been free to draw
on illustrative material from whatever region or period best suits the purposes of their
exposition.
Though the volume qualifies as an encyclopedia, in that it encompasses the full
circle of current anthropological knowledge, it is also a book that is designed not just to
be consulted but to be read. While conceived as a work of reference, its aims go far
beyond that: namely to lay the foundations for an integrated and synoptic perspective
on the conditions of human life that is appropriate to the challenges of the next century.
For an encyclopedia, the number of articles is relatively small, but by the same token,
authors have had the opportunity to develop their ideas and arguments at some length.
Each article, indeed, stands as a major contribution, an innovative synthesis at the
cutting edge of the discipline. Moreover, the ordering of articles is not arbitrary, but
has been carefully designed to bring out to best advantage the connections between

them, and to weld the volume into a coherent whole. The resulting combination of
breadth of coverage and depth in the treatment of
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

individual topics is, I believe, unparalleled in contemporary anthropological
literature.
I expect this book to be read primarily by students, teachers and academics
working in fields of anthropology or related disciplines, who need to turn to a
significant overview of current thinking to supplement their existing specialist
knowledge. But I hope it will also offer a source of ideas and inspiration to the
enthusiastic and informed 'general reader' who, once having encountered
anthropology, wishes to find out more about various aspects of the subject. To
cater for this wide readership, the articles are written so as to be both
authoritative and yet readily comprehensible to professionals, students and lay
persons alike. Each article is followed by a comprehensive list of references
detailing works cited in the text, and by a selected list of 'further reading'
recommended for those who wish to pursue the themes of the article in greater
depth. Naturally, there is often a good deal of overlap between items included
under 'further reading' and those listed in the references; however the costs of
duplication were felt to be outweighed by the advantages of presenting the
'further reading' as a single, integral list.
What lies ahead is a journey through some of the most exciting and
challenging domains of contemporary scholarship. I wish the reader bon voyage
while, with the merciful relief of a marathon completed, I lay down my own pen.

xxn

THE CONTRIBUTORS
BARBARA ADAM received her Ph.D. from the University of Wales, and is currently
Lecturer in Social Theory at the University of Wales, Cardiff. She is the founder editor
of the journal Time and Society. She has written extensively on the subject of social
time, and her book, Time and Social Theory (1990), won the Philip Abrams Memorial
Prize in 1991, awarded by the British Sociological Association for the best first book.
ALAN BARNARD is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of
Edinburgh. He was educated at the George Washington University, McMaster
University and the University of London, receiving his Ph.D. in 1976. Before moving
to Edinburgh in 1978, he taught at the University of Cape Town (1972-3) and at
University College London (1976— 8). He has carried out fieldwork with the Nharo
and other Khoisan peoples of Botswana and Namibia and his research interests include
kinship theory, hunter-gatherer studies, and regional comparison. He is the author, with
Anthony Good, of Research Practices in the Study of Kinship (1984), and of Hunters
and Herders in Southern Africa (1992). He is co-editor of Kinship and Cosmology
(1989), and was editor of the journal Edinburgh Anthropology for 1988. Alan Barnard
has published numerous articles on kinship, hunter-gatherers and the Khoisan peoples
of southern Africa, as well as a wordlist and grammar of the Nharo language (1985)
and a children's book on the Bushmen (1993). His recent interests include the early
history of social anthropology and the relation between anthropology and popular
literature.
NIKO BESNIER gained his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1986,
and is now Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University.
He has conducted research in various locations in Western Polynesia and Melanesia,
principally on Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu. His published works deal with literacy,
emotional life and the cultural construction of the person, political rhetoric, gossip, and
the relationship between verbal accounts and social action.
ANDRE BETEILLE is Professor of Sociology at the University of Delhi where he has
taught since 1959. He was Simon Fellow at the University of

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THE CONTRIBUTORS

Manchester (1965-6), Commonwealth Visiting Professor at the University of
Cambridge (1978-9), held the Tinbergen Chair at Erasmus University, Rotterdam
(1984), was Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics (1986), Visiting
Scholar in Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1988), Fulbright
Distinguished Lecturer (1989) and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin
(1989-90). He has delivered the Auguste Comte Memorial Lecture at the London
School of Economics (1979), the Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture (1979) and the
Commonwealth Lectures (1985) at the University of Cambridge, and the Ambedkar
Lectures at the University of Bombay (1980). His research interests include
stratification and social class, equality and social justice, and race, caste and ethnicity.
In addition to many papers in scholarly journals, Beteille is the author of Caste, Class
and Power (1965), Castes: Old and New (1969), Studies in Agrarian Social Structure
(1974), Inequality among Men (1977), Ideologies and Intellectuals (1980), The Idea of
Natural Inequality and Other Essays (1983), Essays in Comparative Sociology (1987),
Society and Politics in India (1991) and The Backward Classes in Contemporary India
(1992). He is the editor of Social Inequality (1969) and Equality and Inequality (1983).
MARK COHEN graduated from Harvard College and Columbia University with
degrees in anthropology. He has carried out archaeological fieldwork in North, South
and Central America, in southern Europe and in East Africa. He is author of The Food
Crisis in Prehistory (1977) and Health and the Rise of Civilization (1989), and senior
editor of Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (1984). He has been a Fellow of
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (19789), a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Visiting Scholar
at Cambridge University (1985-6), and a Fulbright Lecturer at the Hebrew University,
Jerusalem (1989-90). Mark Cohen is currently Distinguished Teaching Professor of
Anthropology at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, where he is

working to reconstruct patterns of health in a sixteenth century Christian May a
population.
JEAN DEBERNARDI was educated at Stanford University and at the University of
Oxford, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1986. She has
carried out fieldwork in Penang, Malaysia (1979-81), and in Taiwan and Fujian
Province of the People's Republic of China (1987). DeBernardi has taught at Beloit
College, the University of Michigan and Bryn Mawr College, and is presently Assistant
Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta at Edmonton,
Canada. Her research interests include Chinese popular religious culture, the use of
anti-languages in Chinese secret societies, and linguistic nationalism in Taiwan. She is
currently working on a book entitled Empire over Imagination: Chinese Popular
Religious Culture in Colonial and Post-Colonial Malaysia,

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THE CONTRIBUTORS

ROBIN DUNBAR was educated at Oxford University and at the University of Bristol,
where he received his Ph.D. in 1974. He has subsequently held research posts at
Cambridge, Stockholm and Liverpool Universities. He is now Professor of Biological
Anthropology at University College London. His research has been concerned mainly
with the evolution of mammalian social systems and has involved field studies of
primates and ungulates in Africa and Scotland. He is the author of Reproductive
Decisions: An Economic Analysis of Gelada Baboon Social Strategies (1984) and
Primate Social Systems (1988), and has published numerous articles in books and
journals on themes in primatology, sociobiology and human evolution.
TIMOTHY K.EARLE is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,
Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan
in 1973. His research interests include the evolution of pre-industrial complex societies,

institutional finance and prehistoric economies. He has carried out field research on the
Hawaiian Islands and in Andean South America, and is presently involved in a longterm investigation of Danish Neolithic and Bronze Age chiefdoms. Earle is the editor
or co-editor of a number of volumes, including Exchange Systems in Prehistory (1977),
Modeling Change in Prehistoric Subsistence Economies (1980), Contexts for
Prehistoric Exchange (1982) and Specialization, Exchange and Complex Society
(1987). He is the author of Economic and Social Organization of a Complex Chiefdom:
the Halelea District, Kauai, Hawaii (1978), and (with A.Johnson) of The Evolution of
Human Society (1987).
ROY ELLEN was educated at the London School of Economics, where he received his
B.Sc. in 1968, and his Ph.D. in 1972. He was Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the
LSE in 1972-3, and thereafter Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader at the University of
Kent at Canterbury, England. Since 1988 he has been Professor of Anthropology and
Human Ecology at the University of Kent. He has carried out several periods of social
anthropological fieldwork among the Nuaulu of Seram, Eastern Indonesia, as well as in
Sulawesi and Java, and in the Gorom archipelago. His interests include ecological
anthropology (especially of rain forest environments), regional organization of trade,
ethnobiology and classification, and anthropological research methods. He is the author
of Nuaulu Settlement and Ecology (1978), Environment, Subsistence and System (1982)
and The Cultural Relations of Classification (1993). He has also edited or co-edited a
number of collections, including Social and Ecological Systems (1979), Classifications
in their Social Context (1979), Ethnographic Research (1984) and Malinowski Between
Two Worlds (1988). He was the Royal Anthropological Institute's Curl Lecturer for
1987.
CLIVE GAMBLE was born in 1951 and educated at Cambridge (MA and Ph.D.). He
is now Reader in Archaeology at the University of Southampton. He has carried out
extensive fieldwork in Palaeolithic Archaeology both in
xxv