A History of Anthropological Theory

Thomas S. Abler is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the author of A Canadian Indian Bibliography, 1960-1970.

For more than 20 years, Paul Erickson has taught a course in the history
of anthropological theory to senior undergraduate students at St.
Mary’s University in Halifax. Consisting of three chapters, this
volume is a compact distillation of the topics covered in that course.
The text (excluding the preface, review questions, glossary, suggestions
for further readings, acknowledgements, and index) comes to just 136
pages. Four of the nine sections in the final chapter were written by
Liam Murphy, a former student of Ericson’s.

For many scholars, the history of anthropology begins with L.H.
Morgan’s pioneering fieldwork among the Iroquois in the 1840s or with
E.B. Tylor’s definition of culture in 1871. Erickson, on the other
hand, locates its origins in European antiquity. His first chapter
traces views of science and society from the pre-Socratic period to the
end of the 19th century. A discussion of Marxism is followed by sections
dealing with classical evolutionism, diffusionism, the beginnings of
archeology, and Darwinism.

Chapter 2 (“The Early Twentieth Century”) considers the development
of American anthropology (here Erickson discusses the role of Franz Boas
and his students), Durkheim, French structuralism, the writings of
Levi-Strauss (who is, in fact, generally associated with post–1950
anthropological thought), and British social anthropology.

The final chapter considers cognitive anthropology, the
neoevolutionists (included here is a discussion of the New Archaeology
of the 1960s), cultural materialism, sociobiology, symbolic
anthropology, political economy, and postmodernism. Attention is given
to several authors outside the field (Ardrey, Wilson, Wallerstein,
Bourdieu, and Foucault, among others) who have influenced
anthropological thought.

Although Erickson deserves praise for including archeology and
biological anthropology in his treatment of anthropology’s past, the
brevity of his text often leaves the reader puzzled. Why, for example,
was Morgan “an unlikely candidate for future anthropological fame”?
One wonders, too, about his definition of phonemes as “minimally
contrasting pairs of sounds that create linguistic meaning.” For those
teaching courses on the history of anthropology, this is a text for
which a large number of supplementary readings will be required.