Cross-Cultural

D’Andrade / THEResearch
SAD STORY
/ August
OF2000
ANTHROPOLOGY

The Sad Story of

Anthropology 1950-1999

Roy D’Andrade
University of California, San Diego

Within the social sciences, anthropology appears to have been more

strongly affected by external political trends than its sister disciplines.
The trends affecting anthropology appear to primarily reflect ideas
and attitudes of the intellectual Left in American universities and
colleges. As the intellectual Left moved from the antigovernment ac-
tivism of the early 1960s to Marxism and expectations of the death
of capitalism in the 1970s, and through the disenchantment with
socialist communism and alienation from Western culture expressed
by postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, the centrality of these at-
titudes in the anthropology professorate of the elite universities re-
sulted in profound changes in the research organization of anthro-
pology and its choice of methods. This article will attempt to outline
these changes and their impact on the effectiveness of anthropology
as science.

A major thesis of this article is that anthropology, more than the

other social science disciplines, has been affected by the changing
political attitudes of the past 50 years. It should immediately be
said that the political attitudes that have influenced anthropology
are primarily the political attitudes of academics, not the attitudes
of the American voter. Following the Second World War, the politi-
cal attitudes of academia have consistently been oriented toward
the Left side of the political spectrum. However, the specific con-
tent of these attitudes has varied greatly from one period to an-
Cross-Cultural Research, Vol. 34 No. 3, August 2000 219-232
© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
219
220 Cross-Cultural Research / August 2000

other. In the period from the end of the Second World War through
the mid-1960s, the mainstream academic political position was
that of liberalism positively oriented toward civil rights, social wel-
fare, and the self-determination of nations.

THE 1950S AND 1960S

The intellectual agenda of anthropology during the 1950s and

early 1960s shifted from that of prewar anthropology. From the
early 1900s to the Second World War, the primary agenda of social
and cultural anthropology was to document the life of illiterate
peoples. By 1949, when Murdock’s Social Structure was published,
a large body of ethnographic work had been completed. Murdock
had detailed in his Outline of Cultural Materials (1965) the kind of
information that a good ethnography should contain, and by the
early 1960s, world samples of more than 500 societies could be
coded for most of these items.
When I entered graduate school in 1957, the shift in the prewar
agenda was already in place. The goal was still ethnography. How-
ever, there was a general sense that classic ethnographies, as good
as they were, lacked depth in certain important ways. The new goal
was to produce more theoretically oriented accounts. There was, of
course, controversy about which theory should be used. From
Lounsbury at Yale and Goodenough at Pennsylvania came an agenda
that stressed an approach based on linguistic units and the taxo-
nomic and paradigmatic organization of the lexicon. From Geertz
and Schneider, influenced by Talcott Parsons’s ideas about the sep-
aration of culture from the social system and personality, came an
emphasis on symbols and meanings, different in tone but similar
in intent to Kluckhohn’s work on values. Between the two, the field
of cognitive anthropology began, interested in symbols and mean-
ings but focusing on semantic analysis. Levi- Strauss’s influence in
the United States increased during this period, introducing
structuralist ideas from Jacobsen and Saussure to the analysis of
kinship, myth, and ritual. Whiting, Spiro, and others were inter-
ested in the expressive and defensive personality functions of cul-
ture. Less concerned with culture as idea and symbol, Sahlins,
Steward, Harris, Rappaport, and others held to a more materialist
orientation, stressing the importance of economic and environ-
mental factors. The Boasian school, with its emphasis on historical
 D’Andrade / THE SAD STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 221

relationships, continued to be important in area studies. In much

of this work, there was a stress on methods— part of the agenda
was to improve ethnography in ways that would yield better data
that would then be relevant to theoretical issues.
In a loose way, this agenda of “theoretically relevant description”
fit the academic and national political climate of the time. Democ-
racy, education, science, and technology were the American way
and the American export. Anthropologists, although ambivalent
about losing their tribal peoples, felt that bringing back ever better
understandings of other peoples—other societies and other cul-
tures—would yield a natural positive benefit in creating better
public policies and a more enlightened citizenry. This was also a
period of economic growth. In constant dollars, the income of the
average American citizen doubled from 1947 to 1972. The Peace
Corps, the development of the United Nations, and the growing
political independence of the once colonized world all contributed
to a general sense of optimism about the international scene. The
number of departments of anthropology grew rapidly and, with the
assistance of the baby boom, the academic job market for anthro-
pologists grew rapidly.

VIETNAM

One great temptation in thinking about history is wondering

about counterfactuals—what would have happened if only X had
or had not happened? What would have happened if President
Johnson had decided not to prosecute the Vietnam War? But what-
ever might have happened, what did occur brought about a great
shift in the political attitudes of academia. The universities and
colleges were the sites of resistance to the war. The radical Left
pushed the liberal Left off center stage. In anthropology, those
anthropologists who were guilty by virtue of having any associa-
tion, however innocent, with the war were condemned by name on
the floor of the business meeting of the American Anthropological
Association. The war radicalized a generation of students and
young faculty who were against science as part of the military
industrial complex and who were profoundly alienated from what
was called the “establishment.”
At first, only sporadic books and articles argued that anthropol-
ogy should change in the direction of the new antiestablishment,
222 Cross-Cultural Research / August 2000

antiscience, and anticapitalist attitudes. These publications, like

Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes and published in
1972, contained mainly young anthropologists and seemed to have
little effect. It appeared that the mainline cultural agenda of theo-
retically improved ethnography had not changed. However, as the
Vietnam generation matured and moved to positions of impor-
tance in anthropology departments, the shift to a more Marxist
and antiscience orientation grew to become the mainline of cul-
tural anthropology. Sherry Ortner, in 1984, wrote a good piece about
anthropology from the 1960s through the 1980s. She began by
outlining the debates of the 1960s between the symbolic anthro-
pologists, structuralists, and cultural ecologists. Ortner went on
to say,

Starting in the late 1960’s, in both the United States and France
(less so in England), radical social movements emerged on a vast
scale. First came the counterculture, then the antiwar movement,
and then, just a bit later, the women’s movement; these movements
not only affected the academic world, they originated in good part
within it. Everything that was part of the existing order was ques-
tioned and criticized. In anthropology, the earliest critiques took the
form of denouncing the historical links between anthropology on one
hand, and colonialism and imperialism on the other. But this merely
scratched the surface. The issue quickly moved to the deeper ques-
tion of the nature of our theoretical frameworks, and especially the
degree to which they embody and carry forward the assumptions of
bourgeois Western culture.
The rallying symbol of the new criticism, and of the theoretical al-
ternatives offered to replace the old models, was Marx. (1984, p. 138)

Ortner traces the theoretical twists and turns through the

1970s and 1980s concerning the shifts from standard Marxism to
French structural Marxism to political economy to power, practice,
and discourse. These debates occurred at a high theoretical level,
mainly outside anthropology. In anthropology, although little
explicit theoretical discussion took place in the journals, a great
shift in agenda took place. The new goal of ethnography and
research was no longer theoretically relevant description but
moral critique. The critique was directed against power, domina-
tion, and oppression. However, the classical Marxist emphasis on
material factors was greatly attenuated. Capitalism was still an
enemy, but primarily because it, like the state, science, the media,
and Western bourgeois culture, was powerful.
 D’Andrade / THE SAD STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 223

The major critique in anthropology was directed against perni-

cious ideas. The Marxist notions of ideology and false conscious-
ness were reworked into a critique of culture itself, now seen as the
most powerful source of oppression. The overall thrust was more
Hegelian than materialist. As Adam Gopnik put it, in a recent New
Yorker piece on French intellectual life,

The new anti-liberal polemic has often been associated, fairly or

unfairly, with people like the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who . . . has
become France’s “dominant intellectual.” . . . Anyone familiar with
the general shape of post-Marxist thought will immediately recog-
nize the key ideas. Social consent is manufactured, and representa-
tive democracy is an illusion; there exists only the struggle for domi-
nation, and its prime arena is now not the marketplace but the
media-place, where bourgeois culture attempts to perpetuate its
domination by denying even the possibility of any other way. Liberal
society is really a Hobbesian universe, made more dreadful by the
gaiety of its disguise, like one of those serial killers dressed as clowns
in a slasher movie. (1999, p. 66)

CRITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

By the mid-1980s, critical anthropology had become main-

stream. The goal of mainline cultural anthropology was to critique
hidden and open oppressions of Western bourgeois culture: its rac-
ism, sexism, nation alism, homopho bia, and scientism. The
Enlightenment—the historical center of liberal ideas—came to be
seen as a well of poison. According to this agenda, the task of the
ethnographer was to examine the resistance of non-Western and
peripherialized peoples to the Western modernizing forces that
oppress them. The World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund were enemies, science was an enemy, and rationality was a
destructive force. Bureaucratic planning was one of the major gen-
erators of oppression. Conformity on the part of ordinary people
was treated as evidence of their complicity in their own oppression.
Evolutionary biological theories were thought to be dangerous
because of their potential use by racists, and epistemological rela-
tivism was given lip service, not because it was really believed but
because any other belief was thought to lead to positivism, science,
and racism.
224 Cross-Cultural Research / August 2000

Last year, I made up a questionnaire about these topics and gave

it to our 1st-year graduate students (n = 9). (University of Califor-
nia, San Diego graduate students do not tend to be especially radi-
cal. I also gave the same questionnaire to a sample of more than
100 undergraduates and found a very similar pattern of results.)
More than 80% agreed that Western oppression is a major world
problem. In addition, 100% agreed that oppressive relations
between men and women are created by cultural systems of belief.
More than 80% agreed that the social sciences should focus on
issues of gender, race, class, and ethnicity, and 67% agreed that dif-
ferent cultures have different but equally valid moral standards.
More than 50% agreed that there are no facts—only observations
made from a certain viewpoint that can always be contradicted by
other observations made from other viewpoints. However, 0%
agreed that the best way of understanding culture and society is
through science.

NUMERICAL ILLITERACY

The effect of these attitudes on the organization of the discipline

has been powerful. More than just affecting the content of courses,
it has affected who gets hired. This is especially evident with
regard to those anthropologists who have a quantitative orienta-
tion. The departure from the Berkeley anthropology department
by Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, and Gene Hammel illustrated what
Nancy Scheper-Hughes termed “epistemological struggle” within
the university, epitomized by the refusal of the majority of the
Berkeley department to hire a quantitative cultural anthropolo-
gist. The same kind of split occurred at Stanford, where the impos-
sibility of hiring scientifically oriented anthropologists in a depart-
ment dominated by cultural anthropologists has resulted in the
administration creating two separate departments of anthropol-
ogy. At Irvine, once a central place for quantitative anthropology, a
position for a quantitative anthropologist was lost because the
department was unable to agree on an acceptable candidate. Today,
there are almost no anthropology departments that give standard
quantitative training, let alone training in probability models,
causal analysis, and multidimensional scaling. The departments
in most elite universities do not, and see no need to, teach any of
this to cultural anthropologists.
 D’Andrade / THE SAD STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 225

Well, one might ask, who needs statistics, quantitative analysis,

and ques tion naires any way? Cul tural anthro pology’s main
strength is ethnography and there are not many statistics in most
ethnographies. But one cannot do cross-cultural research if one
does not know any statistics. And without statistical methods,
there is no systematic way to compare ethnographies, which leaves
anthropology without a strong method to generalize beyond the
individual case. Even more incapacitating than not being able to do
cross-cultural research, without some knowledge of statistics such
findings cannot even be understood.
Furthermore, much of the epistemology of the social science
depends on statistical ideas. Let me give an example. This year an
anthropology graduate student said to me, “What does chi-square
have to do with understanding how people think?” If one tries to
tell a modern cultural anthropology student that all generaliza-
tions about the world—including generalizations about what peo-
ple think—require at least a contingency table or the comparison
of mean differences, the student looks at you as if you had just
landed from the moon. This makes no sense to them. To go on to
more complex issues concerning correlation, partitioning of vari-
ance, clustering of attributes, degrees of consensus, and so on is
impossible. The basic epistemological schemas are not there and
not missed. A basic framework is missing—a framework needed to
evaluate generalizations of any sort.
To this jeremiad, mainline cultural anthropology has ready
answers. We do not need generalizations, they say, because we do
interpretations. Meanings are qualitative, not quantitative. We do
not need to test our ideas about oppression, domination, power, and
the pervasive power of regimes of knowledge. We know these
things are true from our own experience and the writings of impor-
tant figures like Foucault and Bourdieu. We know cultural dis-
course causes people to interpret the world in certain ways, and
these ways determine the subjectivity of people and hold them in
oppression. We will study those places in which such oppression is
most prevalent and most resisted: in the barrios and ghettos, in the
world of migrants, in the situations of displaced persons, in the his-
tory of colonized peoples, and in the dislocations caused by global
capitalism. What we want to do is observe the local working out of
this great truth and free people from the regimes of power and
knowledge that enslave them.
226 Cross-Cultural Research / August 2000

In my opinion, statistics and quantitative methods are disliked

so much because they are always a challenge to those who believe
they already know the truth. For example, imagine someone mak-
ing the claim that regimes of power and knowledge oppress people.
Then imagine an audience of statisticians listening to this claim
and trying to figure out what the relevant tables might look like,
how the categories might be defined, or how one could know when
one had encountered a relevant instance. Such an audience is
likely to be skeptical. Thinking about things in statistical terms
inevitably brings up issues of empirical and conceptual adequacy.
One might think that although cultural anthropologists are
uninformed about statistics and measurement, they might still be
good at theory. But this is not the case. With a few exceptions, the-
ory has never been a long suit in anthropology, and today there are
no important theoretical innovators in cultural anthropology, with
some exceptions from the subfield of psychological anthropology.
To do theory well, one must be able to evaluate alternative models
and then construct from these alternative models even better mod-
els. But, evaluation of alternative models immediately runs into
the basic problem of how to evaluate models in the first place. What
theoretical work there is in cultural anthropology is primarily
based on reasoning from assumed first principles—people must be
shaped by their symbolic worlds, psychology cannot be relevant to
cultural facts, and so on. This makes for a cut-and-paste approach
to the great theorists: much debate, principle-begging arguments,
little clarity and no progress.
So, in my account, the special combination of antiestablishment
attitudes generated by the Vietnam War brought about destruc-
tive changes in anthropology. The combination of epistemological
relativism (there is no real foundation for knowledge) and moral
advocacy (I know what is right and the world should change to con-
form to my vision of what is right) has had a joint effect that neither
attitude might have had by itself. Epistemological relativism on its
own is easily contradicted by even small advances in knowledge. It
is a very weak intellectual position. Moral advocacy without
epistemological relativism may have some problems with bias and
serviceable definitions (Is the American police force an instrument
of oppression?), but by itself it does not make good research impos-
sible. Marvin Harris, a strong moral advocate for example, has
been an important contributor to anthropological research and
theory. It is the combination that is so deadly. Moral advocacy gives
 D’Andrade / THE SAD STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 227

certainty and the sense that every denunciation of oppression is a

real achievement. And, epistemological relativism makes checking
on the truth of such denunciations impossible.
Some further evidence for this point comes from other social sci-
ence disciplines. Many linguists, for example, hold far Left opin-
ions. Chomsky is an exemplar. Political opinions do not interfere
with doing good research in linguistics because the methodological
canons are so strong. In linguistics, one cannot substitute moral
righ teous ness for ana lytic rigor. Simi larly, in psy chol ogy,
epistemological relativism has not entered the mainstream
because the power of experimentation makes dismissal of results
one does not like intellectually insupportable. If moral advocates
in social psychology do good experimental work and if this sup-
ports their moral positions, so much the better for the discipline.
Such work, whatever its animus, because it advances knowledge,
helps rather than threatens the scientific agenda.

THE PRESENT

One can argue the inferences, but the general situation is clear.
Although anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s was not particu-
larly quantitative or measurement oriented, it was concerned with
issues of descriptive adequacy and did not reject those who were
trying to develop methods of systematic data analysis. This
changed. The anthropologists who have quantitative skills were
trained before the big agenda shift to cultural critique. Given the
current trend, in 10 years there will be no young cultural anthro-
pologists competently trained in quantitative methods.
If one looks at the current field of cultural anthropology, it is not
just statistics and quantitative methods that have been forced out.
Linguistic anthropology is almost gone. Folklore is gone. Psycho-
logical anthropology is holding on but with a dwindling base. Eco-
nomic anthropology is almost gone. Medical anthropology has
shifted primarily to cultural critique. The study of kinship is in
eclipse. Cross-cultural studies by anthropologists are in decline.
The scholarly study of religion in anthropology has decreased
almost to the vanishing point.
The field of cultural anthropology has undergone radical
despecialization. The immediate cause is that graduate students
are not trained in these special fields, even though undergraduates
228 Cross-Cultural Research / August 2000

show interest and enthusiasm for these topics. The institutional

base for specialization has been eroded to the point that reproduc-
tion of many of these subfields is close to impossible. My specula-
tion is that the despecialization of cultural anthropology is ulti-
mately based on the loss of canons of empirical justification.
Specialists have no cachet if their empirical evidence is not taken
seriously. To be taken seriously in mainline cultural anthropology
today, one must have a project that enters the conversation with
moral implications. The lack of good ways to decide if someone has
a real finding has resulted in a general implosion toward the same
few issues that everyone is talking about. The plight of graduate
students is especially heartrending because they must figure
out how to do some thing that is in, but not so far in it will
soon be out. This has a further effect of putting a great deal of
power in the hands of elite universities, because that is where what
is in and what is out gets decided. Today, a young Ph.D. from a uni-
versity in the sticks will have a hard time succeeding in cultural
anthropology.
Some might suspect I exaggerate. But try to elicit from your
favorite anthropology informant the important findings of main-
line cultural anthropology over the past 20 years. You will probably
be told that we now know that culture is discourse, power is omni-
present, knowledge is central to power, Western culture is hege-
monic, oppression is diffuse and general, and that we are now in a
postmodern world of late capitalism and a global diaspora without
fixed communities or cultures.
It is hard to be impressed with this list. Part of this list is simply
definitional (culture is discourse). Part consists of statements of
interest rather than findings (power is omnipresent). Part is magi-
cal thinking (that by calling capitalism “late” capitalism, we create
its demise). Part consists of moral complaints (oppression is diffuse
and general). Part consists of items of confused general knowledge
(the global diaspora without fixed communities). And part is prob-
ably just plain wrong (we are in a new postmodern period—this is
said despite the evidence that the modernizing triad of new tech-
nologies, capitalized industries, and increasing prosperity is wax-
ing, not waning, both in new nations and in Western Europe and
the United States).
Some times I doubt my own con clu sions. Could main line
cultural anthropology really have such a naive, moralistic, unso-
phisticated, jargony, and paranoid agenda? After writing the para-
 D’Andrade / THE SAD STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 229

graphs above, I looked at them and thought I must be exag-

gerating. Then, the January Newsletter (1999) of the American
Anthropological Association arrived, and I read the column writ-
ten by the Newsletter editor, D. Heath, for the Society for Cultural
Anthropology, talking about the Society’s June conference in San
Francisco. Its general theme is “states of power: culture, capital
and govermentality.” In Heath’s column the reader is told anthro-
pology seeks to rethink the relations between culture and power
and shift to Foucauldian and political economy perspectives. What
anthropologists should find out about is how culture is “directly
embroiled in different forms of ruling [and] the mutations of capi-
talism” (p. 48). The conference seeks to bring together people inter-
ested in “the interplay of culture and power in institutionalizing
relations of production, ruling, markets, violence, and every day
life.” All of this suggests “a series of critical questions” such as how
anthropologists can assess agencies like the World Bank, the Mul-
tilateral Investments Agreement, the ways globalization disrupts
social formations, the new cultural and political relations to capi-
tal, and so on (Heath, 1999). The moralistic agenda is quite appar-
ent, along with the idea that cultural meaning systems are appro-
priated by the oppressive forces to mystify oppression. There is no
thought of testing the truth of these ideas—the impetus is to find
ethnographic sites to document these truths. According to this
agenda, there is no good power, only bad power, and no good money,
only bad money.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

I have been stressing that my account applies to mainline cul-

tural anthropology. In anthropology, as in other fields, the mainline
agenda is flanked by other agendas and maverick positions. Naomi
Quinn (n.d.) has described academic disciplines as large circuses.
In the circus of each discipline, there are many rings, and in each
ring there are various performers. There is normally a center ring
that commands the attention of most of the audience, but that is
always in danger of losing the focus of attention to other rings. For
almost 20 years, the agenda of moral critique and anti- science has
been in the center ring. But the show is wearing thin. Empiricism,
what ever its philosophic prob lems, is a pow erful force. The
huge enter prise of nat ural science has become annoyed with
epistemological relativism. Cultural studies are becoming an
230 Cross-Cultural Research / August 2000

academic joke. (And in academia, one can argue for ideas that are
very strange and still be accepted and sometimes even admired.
But one cannot be a joke.)
Perhaps the brightest spot in anthropology is in the application
of evolutionary paradigms to the study of human nature. Harvard
maintains a strong program in biological anthropology, as do the
University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California,
Santa Barbara; and Pennsylvania State. Quantitative and statisti-
cal training for these students is relatively good and the connection
with work in genetics and ecology gives biological anthropology
work a source of strength outside anthropology departments.
There is an interest in evolutionary psychology in cross-cultural
work as well as systematic cross-species comparisons. Psychologi-
cal anthropology, with its ties to cross-cultural research, struggles
along with some successes despite the fact that about one third of
its practitioners, by my count, say they do not like science. Cogni-
tive anthropology receives good support from the growing interest
outside cultural anthropology in the brain and consciousness.

THE FUTURE

Finally, let me say something about the future. Chaos theory

tells us that the future is often something we cannot predict. On
the other hand, some trends continue a long time. First, based on
various attitude studies (Manolis, Levin, & Dahlstrom, 1997), it
appears that the new generation of undergraduates are not nearly
as moralistic in orientation as their teachers. It is unlikely the
agenda of critique will motivate them. They are also skeptical of
almost everything, from politicians to classroom moralizing. What
will a new generation of cultural anthropologists turn to? They
may turn to a biologically based evolutionary agenda or to psycho-
logical exploration of the interaction of culture and psyche, as some
of the brightest graduate students I know have done. As the old
agenda of moral critique and relativism fades, they may become
the new pioneers. They will be handicapped by their lack of train-
ing in methods and math, but let us hope they can remedy that.
Geertz once remarked that he did not think that the field of cul-
tural anthropology would outlive him; I disagree. I think insti-
tutional frameworks have remarkable durability. In my lifetime, I
saw that the intellectually successful innovations of departments
or programs in social relations did not succeed in reorganizing
 D’Andrade / THE SAD STORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY 231

traditional departmental boundaries. Anthropology is firmly

established in the curriculum of most colleges and universities,
and cultural anthropology has the support of biological anthropol-
ogy and archaeology, fields in which doing science is well estab-
lished and that have continued to make real discoveries.
On the other hand, I am afraid that, with the exception of some
bright mavericks, the field of cultural anthropology will become
more peripheral in the social sciences and lose ground to sociology
and social psychology. Sociology is plagued by many of the same
agenda problems as anthropology, but it is much larger and has a
diverse collection of methods and theories. Sociologists do ethnog-
raphy too, and they combine survey data and institutional statis-
tics of all sorts with historical analysis and modeling. They are
involved in more practical applications and many have continued
to take both theory and method seriously. I expect sociology to
become an increasingly powerful discipline in the next 20 years.
Social psychology will, I feel sure, expand into the field of psy-
chological anthropology. Social psychologists have not only the
advantage of numbers, but they are also good methodologists and
experimentalists. There is growing interest among social psycholo-
gists in exploring the effects of culture on the human psyche, and
collaborative cross-cultural work with psychologists from other
nations is routine nowadays. There will still be a niche for psycho-
logical anthropologists, especially those interested in the psycho-
logical makeup of people from exotic cultures, but psychology will
most probably command the big battalions.
I believe there will also be a place for the continuing practice of
ethnography. Most cultural anthropologists are not good at sys-
tematic data analysis, but they are good at putting together the
complex impressions engendered by participant observation into
coherent accounts. There is a place for informed reporting. Ethnog-
raphy today is something like a high art form in which excellent
writing skills, skillful self-presentation, proper presentation of
moral sentiments, and real world information are combined into
sometimes interesting and illuminating accounts. Cultural anthro-
pologists pay considerable attention to these accounts. However,
my guess is that participant observation based ethnography will
continue to lose its importance as a scientific method of interest to
other fields and that a variety of techniques involving the analysis
of many kinds of data—historical, institutional, legal, survey, and
even experimental—will erode its pride of place.
232 Cross-Cultural Research / August 2000

Despite all this, potentialities still exist in cultural anthropol-

ogy. Cultural anthropologists do know something about human
groups and how ideas function within groups. Many are fine
observers of particular human scenes. The problem is to work out
how to increase the knowledge and skill of the field, rather than
just letting it erode away. In any case, systematic cross-cultural
research will flourish regardless of what happens in anthropology
because its findings and problems are theoretically and humanly
interesting. I hope anthropology will participate, but if it does not,
there is no need to mourn. If anthropology becomes too ignorant to
do cross- cultural research, the old mother field still deserves a
goodbye wave and maybe even a tear. The great cross-cultural
exploration begun more than 100 years ago will continue with or
without anthropology.

References

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Heath, D. (1999). States of power: Culture, capital & governmentality. An-
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Hymes, D. (1972). Reinventing anthropology. New York: Random House.
Manolis, C., Levin A., & Dahlstrom, R. (1997). A generation X scale: Cre-
ation and validation. Educational and Psychological Measurement,
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Murdock, G. P. (1949). Social structure. New York: Macmillan.
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ence, gender, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Roy D’Andrade is a professor of anthropology at the University of Califor-

nia, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1962. His
major interests are in cognitive anthropology, quantitative methods, theory,
and American culture. He is the author of The Development of Cognitive
Anthropology (Cambridge University Press, 1995).