BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS

429

Anthropology or Cultural and Critical Theory?

HERBERT S.LEWIS
University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Dictionary of Anthropology. Thomas Barfield, ed.

Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. 626 pp.
Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture, and Social Life. Tim Ingold, ed. New
York: Routledge, 1997. 1128 pp.
A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory. Michael Payne, ed. Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 644 pp.
It may be the dream of someit is certainly the nightmare of othersthat anthropology will be replaced by a
combination of literary and critical theory, cultural studies,
multicultural studies, feminist studies, subaltern studies, or
any of a number of other claimants to the mantle of anthropology or to parts of its terrain ("their sacred domain" as
George Marcus calls it [1998:809]). At recent meetings of
the AAAI have heard it said, for example, that Stuart Hall
should be our model rather than Franz Boas or those who
study the people of the Kalahari (Ferguson 1997); that a
teacher of the history of anthropology finds the works of
Nietzsche, Lukacs, Lyotard, the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, film, feminist and subaltern studies to be
more relevant to the current generation of students than the
works of earlier anthropologists (Hatch 1998). As John and
Jean Comaroff put it, citing a "senior colleague . . . we
have entered a conceptual free-for-all in which our disciplinary quest has no terrain of its own anymore. Our tropes
have been taken over, our signs seized" (1992:ix).
Surveying the shelves of university bookstores or the
major chains can be a disheartening experience for an oldtime anthropologist, as the sections called "anthropology"
seem to shrink while sections called "cultural studies,"
"women's studies," "Native American Studies," "African
American Studies," and "literary theory" proliferate in
number and grow in size. (Those shelves that bear the title
"anthropology" are likely to be filled largely by popular
books on archaeology and prehistory.) These new sections
usually contain some works by authors who are anthropologists by training or label, while many more are by
scholars who come from other backgrounds but write
about subjects that once would have been shelved under
the rubric of anthropology. To judge from the evidence of
the three large and impressive reference works discussed
here, however, perhaps the actual long-range impact of
these new discourses on anthropology as a discipline will
be less than we might think. The lack of overlap between
the two volumes presented as "anthropology" and the one
devoted to "cultural and critical theory" is quite striking.

The books edited by Thomas Barfield and Tim Ingold

are presented as works of and about anthropology and
draw mostly upon the cultural and social anthropology developed in the United States and Britain from 1900 to the
1960s. (There is, of course, the hovering presence of
Claude Levi-Strauss as well.) But the third, The Dictionary
of Cultural and Critical Theory, derives from and belongs
to quite a different world. It is surprising to see, despite the
talk of "blurred genres" and the apparent promiscuous appropriation from one field to the other, just how different
these worlds are.
To begin with we can compare the two that resemble
each other in format and style. Thomas Barfield's The Dictionary of Anthropology and Michael Payne's A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, both published by
Blackwell, are laid out in the same way, as dictionaries or
encyclopedias with entries listed from A to W/Z, from "acculturation" and "adaptation" to "writing systems" in the
case of Barfield, "actant" and "Adorno" to "Zizek" for
Payne. Both contain entries for leading figures, concepts,
schools, and "isms," but Barfield's also includes institutions, activities, and definitions derived from human behavior and ethnography, such as: adoption, affines, bigman, bridewealth, cargo system, circumcision, diffusion,
exogamy, Dravidian and Omaha kinship systems, levirate,
longhouses, social organization, tribe, and witchcraft.
Payne has nothing like these entries, although there is one
for social formation, which is lacking in Barfield. Payne's
contributors write about such things as: ontological relativity, orientalism, the other, overdetermination, patriarchy
(in Barfield as well), phallogocentrism, phallus, and phenomenology.
A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory has a far
higher percentage of entries devoted to individual authors
than does The Dictionary of Anthropology, an indicator of
the relative importance to each of writing and pure theory
versus the study of the diversity and commonality of human behavior. Whereas the individuals with entries in Barfield include Allison Davis, Raymond Firth, E. E. EvansPritchard, Meyer Fortes, Melville Herskovits, Ralph
Linton, Robert H. Lowie, Bronislaw Malinowski, Robert
Redfield, Julian Steward, and Leslie White, Payne's volume features Louis Althusser, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland
Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Leonard Bernstein, Paul De
Man, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Stuart Hall, Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Catharine MacKinnon, Adrienne Rich, Edward Said,
and Raymond Williams. The two dictionaries share hardly
any "greats" other than Franz Boas, Mary Douglas, Claude

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Le"vi-Strauss, Karl Marx, Margaret Mead, and Edward

Sapir. Barfield includes Max Weber, who is absent from
Payne's volume, but the latter includes Benjamin Whorf,
who appears in Barfield only as "Whorfian (or SapirWhorf) hypothesis."
Both volumes include an entry for cultural materialism,
which means the ideas of Marvin Harris for Stephen Sanderson (in Barfield), whereas there is no mention of Harris
at all in the corresponding essay in Payne by Jenny Bourne
Taylor. There is no entry in Payne for Malinowski or Radcliffe-Brown, and the very short essay on functionalism refers to architecture, to Louis Sullivan and Le Corbusier.
Clearly we are in alternative worlds here!
In a bibliography of almost 60 double-column pages
approximately 2,500 entries-Payne has room for about
10 anthropologists and about 35 of their works. (Pierre
Bourdieu swells those numbers to 11 and 43. Eight of his
works are included, as against one by Boas.) As a further
indication of anthropology's marginalization, most of
these citations are derived either from the essay on cultural
anthropology, or from the biographical entries, rather than
from their use in other essays. Two works by Clifford
Geertz are listed in the bibliography, and some of his ideas
are discussed along with Stephen Greenblatt's in the introduction, but neither of these writers rate an entry of their
own. (Geertz gets one in Barfield.) Marcuse is very well
represented in Payne's bibliography, but not Marcus or
Clifford. One article by Donna Haraway is listed, but despite considerable attention to feminist and women's studies there are no citations of works by Henrietta Moore,
Sherry Ortner, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, or any of a great
number of anthropologists who have worked on these topics.
Thomas C. Greaves, one of the very few anthropologists
among the 116 contributors to the Payne volume, concludes his article on cultural anthropology with the brave
statement, "Culture remains arguably the most important
aspect for us to know more about. Central to that investigation is cultural anthropology" (p. 122). He apparently
failed to convince his colleagues. There are long articles on
Native American studies, ecology, and race and racism
without a single reference to a work by an anthropologist
in any of them. Is it possible that we have had nothing to
say on these issues that is worth considering?
Perhaps I have been misled by Payne's use of the term
cultural theory into thinking that this work should be significantly related to anthropology. And yet in the first sentence of his preface he proclaims, "This dictionary provides a full and accessible guide to modern ideas in the
broad interdisciplinary fields of cultural and critical theory,
which have developed from interactions among modern
linguistic, literary, anthropological, philosophical, political and historical traditions of thought" (p. xi, my emphasis). Isn't this the sort of interdisciplinary reaching out and
"blurring of genres" that has been urged on us? And aren't

the "[s]tructuralist, poststructuralist, phenomenological,

feminist, hermeneutical, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and formalist modes of theory" (p. xi) that form the core of this
work precisely the ones that are at the forefront of samuch
prestigious writing in anthropology these days? Unfortunately "the remarkable breaching during the past 20 years
of many of the traditional barriers that once separated disciplines within and between the humanities and social sciences" (p. xi) is not on display in the volume as far as anthropology is concerned.
Barfield's bibliography is about as barren of cultural and
critical theory as Payne's is of anthropology. Its 125 pages
and more than 3,000 references include approximately 40
entries for 20 writers who figure prominently in Payne's
volume. (Michel Foucault accounts for 10 of the 40, one
more than the number of titles listed for Franz Boas. Boas
gets a major essay of his own in Barfield, however, while
Foucault does not.) Of course some of the essays draw
upon writings that were themselves inspired by postmodernist and cultural studies, without necessarily citing the
non-anthropological sources that lay behind them.
We might suspect that the editor achieved this result by
steadfastly ignoring anthropology that did not suit his
tastes, but he writes, "We asked contributors to provide
balanced coverage of their assigned topics, but no particular theoretical approach was privileged, nor did we seek a
set of like-minded souls" (p. viii). When disagreements
arose, "my task as editor was not to hide such disagreements, but to ensure their balanced presentation, if not in a
single entry then at least in terms of cross-referencing other
entries or providing citations of publications that take a different point of view" (p. viii). It seems to me, however, that
his choices do tend to favor the "positivist" and social science side of the divide in anthropology, even though the
volume includes essays on such topics as postmodern/postmodernism and interpretive anthropology (both of
these by Michael Fischer), colonialism and postcolonialism, feminist anthropology, masculinity, women, Marxist
anthropology, and structural Marxism. In any case, this
large and up-to-date vade mecum for anthropology owes
incomparably more to 100 years of anthropology than to
those theoreticians celebrated in Payne's volume. The
same is true of the massive work edited by Tim Ingold.
The Companion Encyclopedia ofAnthropology is a very
different sort of work from either of the dictionaries, but its
1100+ pages also demonstrate how much one can write
about the current status of anthropological thought and
knowledge without drawing upon "cultural studies" and
the "posts." Rather than a dictionary, Ingold commissioned
a work that would be "an encyclopedia of anthropology...
not an encyclopedia about anthropology" (p. xviii, italics
in original). "This volume . . . 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"

BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS

(p. xix). The volume is similar in aim to such earlier collections as those edited by Franz Boas (General Anthropology, 1938) and A. L. Kroeber (Anthropology Today, 1953),
and it is interesting to compare it to the two earlier volumes.
Not unlike Boas and Kroeber, Ingold finds the rationale
for this one in his view 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" (p. xv). like Kroeber's "encyclopedic inventory" of
1953, this collection is also intended not only "to establish
a baseline of anthropological knowledge" but also "to
break new ground, not only by presenting their own versions of the 'state of play' in their respective field of study,
but by charting out new directions of inquiry hitherto unexplored" (p. xx). (It is a welcome relief to find that, in doing
so, hardly any authors found it necessary to follow the current fashion of flaying their less worthy predecessors.)
This book consists of 38 chapters written by 35 different
authors. (Three chapters are actually substantial introductions to each major section by the editor himself.) About
half of the authors are British and half American, with a
few of French origin as well. Not every author is an anthropologist by training, though most are. And like the contributors to Barfield's Dictionary (most of whom are
American), the great majority seem to be drawn from
among the relatively young or academically middle-aged
rather than from the oldest generation of working anthropologists.
Ingold has divided the work into sections entitled: "Humanity," "Culture," and "Social Life." The first section
contains essays on such things as the relation of human behavior and humanity to that of other animals; the evolution
of human physical form and behavior, language, and tool
use; modes of subsistence, diet, demography, and disease
and the destruction of indigenous populations. The 14 essays in the "culture" section range over such topics as symbolism, "artefacts and the meaning of things," technology,
spatial organization, time, literacy, "magic, religion, and
the rationality of belief," myth and metaphor, ritual and
performance, art, music and dance, and ethnicity and nationalism. The last section features essays on human and
nonhuman sociality, kinship, sex and gender, socialization,
enculturation and the development of identity, social aspects of language use, work, division of labor and cooperation, exchange and reciprocity, political domination and
evolution, law and dispute processes, collective violence,
inequality and equality, the national state, colonial expansion, and the contemporary world order.
Such a massive work, with so many different authors,
inevitably contains contributions of varying quality, but
the reader will certainly find a great deal here that is solid,
useful, and suggestive. But to return to the theme of this review essay, it is striking how little this volume, too, has

431

been influenced by the postmodernists. Ingold writes of his

Encyclopedia, "its subject is not anthropology but human
life" (p. xxi). And in keeping with this theme these authors
have tried to tell us what they know about the various dimensions of human life that they have been charged with
elucidating. Many of the authors have drawn liberally from
other disciplines; indeed, some of them have multidisciplinary backgrounds. But few of them owe very much to cultural or critical theory. Those essays that show the most influence from this direction are those by Henrietta Moore,
"Understanding Sex and Gender"; Barbara Adam, "Perceptions of Time"; David Miller, "Artefacts and the Meaning of Things"; and Jean DeBernardi's "Social Aspects of
Language Use."
Despite the lip service paid to anthropology in "cultural
and critical theory," the evidence of the Payne volume suggests that most of his authors (mostly American and British) are not much interested in what anthropologists have
learned over the past century (cf. Handler 1998:460), although an occasional theoretical idea by Douglas, Geertz,
or Levi-Strauss may entice them for a while. The sources
of their ideas are from European (including British) writers
and distinctly European thought, experience, and concerns:
as Fredrik Barth put it, "Foucault, Bakhtin, Habermas,
Lyotard, Gramsciall parochial thinkers, in the sense that
they are working entirely with Western materials and
Western ideas" (n.d.: 9). When non-European experience
is considered, as in "subaltern studies" and "postcolonial
studies," the concepts and conclusions come from European theory, and the substance is derived largely from
reading and deconstructing what other Europeans and
Americans have written about "the other."
Barfield and Ingold's works, in contrast, are concerned
with understanding human behavior in a world full of remarkable cultural and historical diversity; in other words,
they are about anthropological knowledge rather than theory per se. And they are about the full range of human behavior rather than just domination. As we attempt to understand humanity, both the similarities and the differences
among us, we are still tied to the "ethnographic record," to
the record of what human beings have been seen and heard
to do and say, and this makes up the basis from which we
work. We have serious disagreements and debates within
the field, and we have been enriched by eclecticism and by
drawing ideas from many different sources, but at base we
are engaged in a very different undertaking from that represented by Payne's A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical
Studies. And that must be why Barfield and Ingold's volumes owe so little to the ideas represented in Payne's and
those in Payne owe so little to anthropology.
These two compendia of anthropology have been issued
at a crucial time. As I pointed out at the beginning, there
are observers who feel that anthropology is on the verge of
dissolution, to be split among many other disciplines as a
result of both growing specialization within anthropology

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itself and of the impact of "postmodernism." On the other

hand, is it not even more probable that the powerful intellectual fashions of the past several decades will pass into
history, as all fashions must? Perhaps anthropology will
remain standing at the end of this era, its practitioners still
searching for new and better ideas. These attempts by Barfield and Ingold to present up-to-date knowledge of the
ideas and the findings of anthropologists, quite diversified
in scope and undogmatic in tone, can serve as useful resources for the future reconstruction of the fieldunless,
instead, they represent only brave rear-guard actions that
are destined to become little more than relics of a dying
era.
References Cited
Barth, Fredrik
N.d. Redefining the Domains of Anthropological Discourse. Unpublished lecture delivered in Chicago, September 10, 1995.
Boas, Franz
1938 General Anthropology. Boston: D.C. Heath.

Comaroff, John, and Jean Comaroff

1992 Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder,
CO: Westview.
Ferguson, James
1997 The Ancestors We Need: Disciplinary Histories and
Disciplinary Boundaries. Paper presented at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, November 20.
Handler, Richard
1998 Raymond Williams, George Stocking, and Fin-deSiecle U.S. Anthropology. Cultural Anthropology
13(4):447-463.
Hatch, Elvin
1998 A Historical Perspective on Public Interest Anthropology. Paper presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia, December 3.
Kroeber, A. L.
1953 Anthropology Today. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Marcus, George
1998 Review of Texture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4(4):809-810.

How Much Does a Human Environment Humanize a Chimp?

PETER MARLER

University of California-Davis
Apes, Language and the Human Mind. Sue SavageRumbaugh, Stewart G. Shanker, and Talbot J. Taylor.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 244 pp.
The proportion of the genome that humans and chimpanzees have in common is so great as to be both fascinating and puzzling. Anyone familiar with the behavior of
wild chimpanzees cannot fail to be struck, not only by what
we have in common, but also by how much we differ.
Either we need to be more circumspect in extrapolating
from genomic comparisons to the actualities of behavioral
development, or we must be more tenacious in insisting on
the ubiquity of environmental influences, not just on behavior, but on all aspects of ontogeny. The absence of even
the rudiments of language in the natural behavior of chimpanzees invites the speculation that the experience of
growing up in a human family might bring to light entirely
new patterns of chimpanzee behavior, more human-like
than anything seen in the wild. Perhaps they would even
develop language? This prospect has inspired several investigators over the past fifty years to undertake the arduous task of raising an ape, either in the home or in an institutional setting, providing at least some home comforts
and, above all, ample opportunities to learn language.

Such an undertaking is fraught with innumerable difficulties, both practical and theoretical. Although chimpanzees, like dogs, parrots, and other animals, readily discriminate between speech sounds, and can learn to respond
differentially to them, of those listed only parrots imitate
speech. Unlike chimpanzees, parrots possess the specialized brain circuitry needed for vocal imitation as a part of
natural behavior. The inability of apes to acquire speech is
sometimes attributed to an inappropriate vocal tract. Although characteristics of the chimpanzee pharynx probably
do limit potential vowel space, this limitation could not itself completely eliminate the ability to imitate speech, any
more than a cleft palate or glossectomy could completely
eliminate speech in humans (Fletcher 1978). After months
of intensive conditioning, one chimpanzee, Viki (Hayes
1951; Hayes and Hayes 1951), began producing novel
sounds, eventually shaped by lip manipulation into an acceptable "mama." In the ensuing year or so she added
"papa," "cup," and "up" (for a piggy-back ride). After
more training Viki began using these words appropriately,
although sometimes confusedly, especially when excited
or over-urged to speak. By the time of her death Viki had
learned to use three more vicariously produced sounds
meaningfully, including teeth-clacking and a glottal click,
making a total of seven "words"a meager yield for an