I.C. Jarvie - The Revolution in Anthropology

THE REVOLUTION IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Founded by KARL MANNHEIM

THE SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT
In 18 Volumes

THE REVOLUTION IN ANTHROPOLOGY

by

I. C. JARVIE

Foreword by

ERNEST GELLNER

First published in 1964
by Routledge

Reprinted in 1998, 2000, 2002
by Routledge
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or
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First issued in paperback 2010

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1964, 1967 I. C. Jarvie

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Revolution in Anthropology
ISBN 978-0-415-17579-1 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-415-60551-9 (pbk)
The Sociology of Development: 18 Volumes
ISBN 978-0-415-17822-8
The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 978-0-415-17838-9

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

FOREWORD

TWO teachers, amongst the many who have taught at the London School of Economics, are unlikely to be forgotten: Bronislaw Malinowski and Karl Popper. As thinkers, they are both complementary and contrasted. As teachers, they have certain characteristics in common, as far as I can judge (though I have never met Malinowski); they inspire as well as teach. Their seminars are (in Malinowskis case, were) electric and absorbing; they are not something on the syllabus and the time-table that has to be given by the teacher and attended by the student; they are, on the contrary, parts of the history of the School and of their respective subjects, places where minds are (or were) formed or fertilised, where a lifes work could be given its form and direction; they are objects of strong feeling. The list of the participants in Malinowskis seminars between the wars is very close to the list of present leaders in his subject. The importance of the ideas of these two thinkers is proportionate to the inspiration and feeling which they generate.

Their contributions to thought are of course not similar. Malinowski was the founder (or co-founder, with the late Professor Radcliffe-Brown) of modern style social anthropology. In substance, this consists of a shift of attention from speculative genetic theories of human society, and the associated attempt to use contemporary simple societies as surrogate time-machines, to intensive, thorough and accurate field-work, and a style of explanation which concentrates on exploring the interrelations of activities and institutions at any one given time, and refrains from invoking the passage of time as a facile and often vacuous deus ex machina. To paraphrase a remark of Dr. Zhivagos, the life of societies is something which has point in itselfit is not made up of left-overs of which they have somehow forgotten to divest themselves, or, for that matter, of anticipations of the future. Properly understood, this approach involves a disregard neither of history nor of change.

The achievements of this school are by now very considerable. Malinowski was most fortunate in his successor and successors. As a result of their work, our knowledge and our understanding of primitive society are incomparably greater, in kind and extent, than they were before. If thisthe recording of the simpler forms of life, before they disappearwere all, the contribution of functionalist anthropology would already be of utmost importance. In fact, however, the anthropologists characteristic approach, now centred on the valuable if hard-to-define notion of structure, is as fertile when applied to small communities anywhere, irrespective of the level of their technology, and may well prove as valuable when employed in the study of large societies.

The contribution of Karl Popper, primarily a philosopher, is not easy to summarise. From the viewpoint of those concerned with human society, however, his role was not unlike that of Malinowski: at a time when so much was dull, he was exciting. The hero of Thomas Manns Death in Venice was described as having taught a grateful generation that it was possible to plumb the depths of knowledge without losing firmness of moral conviction: Popper taught some grateful members of another generation that it was possible to use the most razor-sharp and ruthless tools of philosophy and logic, and yet be deeply interesting and relevant to moral and social issues. The original centre of Poppers concern and work was epistemology, logic, methodology: the problem of the delimitation of science and the understanding of its progress. But when, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, he turned to politics, the thing which gave that work its appeal was the intimate interdependence in its argument of logical and epistemological issues on the one hand, and political and social ones on the other. He showed that there was no opposition between clarity and importance.

If we turn to the actual substance of the preoccupations and doctrines of the two thinkers and their schools, contrasts and oppositions are at least as striking as similarities. The most obvious similarity concerns the notion of