Ethnography & Theory in Anthropology

This chapter proposes a multi-factorial interpretation of how the contrasting classical emphases in British social and American cultural anthropology appear to reflect and embody the circumstances of their formation. Traditionally, British social anthropology analyses social institutions from the perspective of an ethnographically based comparative sociology. This contrasts sharply with the culturological focus of American anthropology, particularly in its formative stages. American anthropologists usually possess a more sophisticated training in linguistics, yet paradoxically often seem less fluent in the relevant vernacular than their British colleagues. In the beginning, American anthropology was a rescue-operation, directed towards salvaging as much as possible from an archaic world smashed to pieces in the process of colonisation. In the colonial era under the ‘White Peace’, British anthropologists carried out research on societies within their overseas dependencies which, in the main, were administered by expatriate rather than settler officials. Unlike the American Indians, these were usually vigorously alive communities.