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This chapter examines the birth of anthropology as an institutionalized academic discipline in early twentieth-century France. It looks at the founding of the Institut d’ethnologie and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and the key roles played by such figures as Paul Rivet, Marcel Mauss, Marcel Griaule, and Arnold Van Gennep in the early history of French anthropology. Additionally, the chapter addresses the increasingly central role played by fieldwork in anthropological research and scholarship and how the ethnographer’s sense of self also became an object of investigation. Through fieldwork, anthropologists began to study “man” in its broadest sense, a perspective that seemed to betoken the return of a universal form of experience in the face of increasing social segmentation.

Chapter 1 sets out the main arguments and contexts of the book. It begins with a discussion of why using the photographic archive to explore the fieldwork on which Evans-Pritchard’s celebrated writings was based is so transformative. It discusses the relationship between anthropology and colonialism in the 1920s and 1930s, and Evans-Pritchard’s equivocal positioning within this as someone directly funded by the colonial administration and yet having a critical relationship to it. It explores the way in which Evans-Pritchard sought to move anthropology away from the natural sciences and towards history and the humanities. It compares his fieldwork photography to other anthropologists of the period and challenges the assumption that anthropology in the period was not a visual endeavour.

This chapters analyzes two moments in the history of anthropology where the desire to treat concepts as rules, which take the general form of a proposition, runs against their use in practice. In each of the episodes in question—Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of Oedipus and Griaule’s of Ogotommêli’s performance of Dogon cosmology—the anthropologists’ attempts to apply a definition of myth in new contexts are later determined to be ill fitting (after certain antimonies arise), and the counterpart concept reveals itself to be at work. One of the important consequences of this perspective is that it reveals how little mastery we have over our concepts, that we live with concepts that are in the world and that address themselves to us in any number of ways. Another is that the boundary between concepts like myth and literature, if drawn very sharply, is of extremely restricted anthropological use. The extension of concepts to new contexts through examples also transforms the concept (it doesn’t merely illustrate it).

While the nineteenth-century consolidation of the anthropological culture concept shifted ethnological interests away from the figure of the solitary “savage” to wider structures of communal governance, it nonetheless accommodated the eighteenth-century caricatures of instinctive and passionate “savages” by redeploying the terrain of the instinctive onto collective forms of social organization. At the same time, European instincts were believed to exist independent of either social or material influence. This distinction appears in Freud’s analogy of “savage” sociality and the European psyche in Totem and Taboo as a hesitation about whether law and custom are external to the “savage” psyche or constituent parts of it. Freud’s chief ethnological sources for Totem and Taboo—Lorimer Fison and A. W. Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kûrnai (1880) and Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899)—do not mention instinct, but their analyses of savage sociality nonetheless become the basis for Freud’s early instinct theory.

This chapter details the history of the anthropology of ancestors, beginning with the late nineteenth-century work of classical historians and sociologists. The development of the concept of “ancestors” is tracked through the influential ethnographic debates of the 1960s in which African ancestors became the prototypes for those in other world regions. Forays into China and Madagascar show how research from these regions simultaneously expanded the breadth of material on ancestors and contributed to the establishment of two primary and distinct traditions of ancestor studies—African and East Asian. The chapter identifies ten key points derived from the comparative study of ancestors, including the common roles ancestors fill and the cultural domains in which they operate and sometimes dominate. Ancestors do many things around the world, but they are consistently associated with agency, power, authority, descent, inheritance, resources, memory, and identity. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the chapters in the volume.

The field of social and cultural anthropology has evolved from the science of man to something more like cultural critique. Some have deconstructed and thereby dismissed both “cultural science” as well as “development.” Others deconstruct that deconstruction, finding within anthropology itself a culture of marginality. The chapter summarizes stereotypical differences between anthropology and economics, which resemble something like clashing cultures. Given them, how can we move ahead more constructively? As with cross-cultural work in general, we have to be attentive to the differences while at the same time being receptive to ideas and approaches that may at first seem strange or unhelpful. We should entertain the possibility of being both critical and constructive.

Given the significance of the Trobriand Islands in the history of anthropology, this chapter begins by recognizing the anthropological legacy of the islands. Geographical, demographic and socio-historical summaries provide a general context. The fieldwork experience of the author is described, as are the research methods and methodologies employed.

The epilogue re-caps the arguments presented in the previous chapters, and revisits Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope as an analytic terminology for an anthropology of history. The epilogue argues that a comparative approach to indigenous revitalization projects in post-Soviet secular Buryatia reveals the contingent and creative nature of human conceptions of time and space, and the productive capacity of ritual. The chronotopes indexed in rituals exist as negotiated, contingent, performative evocations of pasts that continuously produce Buryats as subjects in the present. The epilogue also reminds readers that all the previous chapters are linked by the way in which contemporary Buryats emphasize materiality as proof for belief, and argues that this is a secular conception that undergirds contemporary Siberian religious practices. The materiality of ritual appears to participants to exceed its explanations, grounding revived post-Soviet religious practice in a secular discourse of evidentiary proof.

An immersion in academic anthropology provides its own culture shocks. Anthropologists have long studied and celebrated indigenous ways of life, diversity, and endogenous change. Yet when asked how to apply that knowledge to make the world better, the question itself becomes the problematic. Whose knowledge, whose idea of better, and who exactly is doing the applying? At the same time, many development practitioners and economists wave away culture as beyond their purview and, anyway, not scientific. If culture is important for many practical reasons and people have been studying culture for many years in many ways, why have the practical applications been so meager and difficult?

Underlying the resistance of many anthropologists to the amplification and application of cultural knowledge are worries about pseudoscience. This chapter reviews the scientific difficulties in studying culture and development. Concepts are fuzzy and contested. Measures are inexact and controversial. The chapter provides new analyses of some of the latest data on various measures of development (including a new construct measuring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) and various cultural variables. The relationships are sometimes surprisingly strong. But they are only suggestive, as full causal models remain an impossible dream. Nonetheless, thanks to analogies from soil science, psychology, and medicine, the chapter concludes with a less grand but perhaps more useful way to apply cultural knowledge.

An obstacle to applying cultural knowledge is the fear of misuse and misunderstanding. Histories of cultural categories becoming cultural stereotypes have left behind scars and sensitivity, and this has lead some scholars to abandon the concept of “culture” altogether. Applying cultural knowledge is also deterred by chronic tension between accepting cultures as they are (trait-taking) or trying to change them (trait-making). Either way, one faces criticism. What’s more, a scholar’s ethnographic nuances may be misappropriated in practice and, in some cases, be bowdlerized by fellow academics. A detailed example from South Sudan conveys the dangers of misuse and misunderstanding. No wonder many anthropologists (and others) shy away from policy design and implementation.