In 1898, seven men left the British Isles with a ship full of the latest scientific equipment. They set out to record a changing culture, and to determine whether Torres Strait Islanders experienced the world in the same way as someone in the shires of England. They tested colour perception, recorded genealogies and took photographs. Several of them returned home to become founding figures in the social sciences: Alfred Haddon in anthropology at Cambridge, and WHR Rivers in experimental psychology. Through their work, British social anthropology was born.
Today, a century later, the voyage which seemed so long and risky has been replaced by one 26-hour flight, several shorter flights and a boat trip-tiring and expensive, but not dangerous. Cambridge academics still travel to the Torres Strait, and Torres Strait Islanders visit Cambridge. Meanwhile the global economy has made many people migrant labourers of one sort or another, moving from country to country for corporate postings, academic appointments or cleaning jobs. Faraway places are now accessible to holiday-makers. Or they may come courtesy of the corner store, run by recent immigrants from another part of the world.
For most of this century, anthropology has been the "science of difference"-the investigator and translator of the humanity of peoples living far from the centres of empire. As travel and television bring eye-witness reports into homes around the world, such investigations may seem increasingly redundant. As anthropologist Keith Hart of Aberdeen University says: "Who believes that a caste of professional experts licensed to tell people what the rest of humanity is like will continue to command public support in the 21st century?"
Those who predict the marginalisation or even the end of anthropology point to the proliferation of the concept of culture. Culture is the concept upon which anthropology was built. The German philosopher Herder invented the idea of culture-meaning a "way of life"-in contrast to civilisation. During the colonial era civilisation came to mean high culture; and culture became something that only "tribal" or "ethnic" people had. Today, whether in academia or in everyday life, everyone talks about culture. Americans are particularly prone to talk about the culture of disability, the culture of gay men-a culture for every interest group. Britain is not immune. When Manchester University decided to study the problem of parking violations, officials spoke confidently of the "culture of car parking." Corporate executives often refer to "corporate cultures" (a reason for their own success when doing well-and their failure when going down).
This might seem a victory for anthropology, a field which began with Victorian ideas of hierarchy and race, and ended celebrating difference and championing theories of cultural relativism. Yet anthropology could be a victim of this "victory." Cambridge anthropologist and historian Alan MacFarlane says that anthropology will become marginalised in the next century: "Just as De Tocqueville noted that the traces of great revolutions disappear after they are successful, so it may be that anthropology, having revolutionised our understanding of the world, will become so much a part of the world that it becomes marginal as a formal discipline." In a similar vein, anthropologists often argue that if their discipline is losing its distinctiveness, it is because it has been so comprehensively pillaged by all other disciplines in the humanities-musicology, the "anthropological turn" in English and history departments, and so on.
A glance inside London's huge Borders bookshop certainly suggests that anthropology is becoming marginalised. There is only one bookcase for anthropology, while sociology commands ten bookcases-and economics an entire corridor. In fact, anthropology at Borders is about as big as the little known field of "men's studies" (which itself is considerably smaller than the gay and lesbian section.) Clearly, if everyone's talking about culture, they're not reading anthropology to do so.
Perhaps anthropology and anthropologists were always marginal. In its early days, social anthropology was the interest of a few eclectic, oddball outsiders. Haddon, who led the Torres Strait expedition and later established the first anthropology department at Cambridge, was a Baptist and a printer's son. Later, prominent practitioners included Catholics, Jews and South Africans-outsiders from the centre of the English intelligentsia.
In academia, anthropology was considered an awkward newcomer. In 19th century Oxford, some of the main opponents of the new discipline were historians who disliked anthropology's claim to be the "study of man"-something they thought they were doing quite well themselves. At the time, this was resolved by shifting anthropology to the study of primitive man. Yet as we reach the end of the 20th century, this distinction is meaningless; the primitive is no longer a viable category.
What anthropology did have earlier this century was a place in the popular imagination. From Bronislaw Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages to Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, anthropologists appeared to the public as romantic outsiders. They travelled huge distances, learned exotic languages, watched strange rituals and returned to tell the tale. Much of this image is the work of Malinowski, the charismatic Pole who dominated anthropology from the London School of Economics in the 1920s and 1930s. Malinowski rejected the team approach of Haddon and Rivers, favouring the ethnographer working alone in an exotic location. He once claimed that while Rivers was anthropology's Rider Haggard, he would be its Joseph Conrad.
Today, the image of the romantic explorer is usually reserved for archaeologists. They race against the clock in popular BBC programmes and are played by Harrison Ford in big budget Hollywood movies. The exotic is now firmly located in history, where the people involved can be relied upon not to talk back. This pleases most anthropologists, who scoff at the old colonial adventurer with a pith helmet image, and happily identify themselves with the modern (even post-modern) world. They are as likely to be found in cities as in villages, at home as abroad. Those who still do "classic" anthropology in remote corners of Amazonia or Papua New Guinea jokingly refer to themselves as "dinosaurs." In the past, anthropologists were assumed to be allied with the interests of the colonial government. Now they are far more likely to be allied with the local or regional interests of the people they study. Many have become active advocates, whether providing documentation in land rights cases in Australia, or arguing against IMF loans to develop the Amazon.
This shift in allegiance liberated anthropologists from their colonial stigma, but left the public somewhat confused about their role. And what will anthropologists do in the future, as the world is increasingly globalised and "traditional culture" becomes a mere performance for tourists? One answer is that many will continue to do what they are doing now-studying their own societies. An increasing number of the grants awarded in Britain are for projects in Britain and Europe. Some of these consider the "classic" anthropological theme of kinship and how new definitions of kinship are arising from advances in reproductive technologies which undermine the old distinction between biological and non-biological kinship. But anthropologists are also now studying the European Union and the BBC, expanding into the elite institutions previously considered the province of sociologists.
Research at home and in one's own language is viewed by many old guard ethnographers as a "soft" option. True fieldwork requires a poverty-stricken village, devilish grammar and plenty of gin-and it is still difficult to get an appointment as an anthropologist unless you are able to double as an "area" expert. Doing research at "home" also brings anthropology into direct competition with other social sciences-history, economics, sociology and cultural studies. How, then, in this over-crowded academic world, can anthropology justify its separate existence?
a case can still be made for the distinctiveness of anthropology in both theme and method. Regarding method, it is fieldwork, or ethnography, which is anthropology's badge of distinction. While many disciplines now claim to do fieldwork, no one does it for as long, or as intensively, as anthropologists. Anthropological fieldwork means living in a community for an extended period, usually a year or more. The idea is to become part of the community's way of life as an insider-like a daughter or son, a neighbour or confidante, learning to experience the world through local activities and relationships-and then to write about it as an outsider. This allows anthropology to present a holistic analysis of human experience, rather than the narrower view produced in much of social science.
As a research strategy, this approach may seem open-ended, but anthropologists argue that flexibility is strength. By living within a community for an extended period, you can adapt your research to what is actually happening, turning what may seem to be a slightly fuzzy-headed approach into a flexible research tool, able to respond quickly and produce results which more linear methods miss. As Cambridge anthropologist Marliyn Strathern says: "Anthropologists follow their noses, ask leading questions and impose their rigour after the event, not before."
Yet fieldwork also takes a long time and can be expensive to fund. Moreover, its very strength-the ability to produce unexpected results-may be a weakness in the eyes of funders who want specific answers to specific questions. One answer is to work in a team with experts from other fields. Impact Assessment Inc, a highly successful San Diego-based firm started by several anthropology PhDs in the 1980s, combines anthropologists with economists and epidemeologists to produce reports on topics such as the social impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska or the effects of isolation within Antarctic research stations.
Another strategy is to tackle the big questions, for which no one expects a single, simple answer. You can also form alliances. Oxford's anthropology faculty has joined the geography department and other universities in Britain to win ?3.8m from the ESRC for directing a research programme on "transnational" communities. Other anthropology departments around Britain have linked up with development programmes, philosophy, cognitive science and the visual arts.
anthropology's central themes and ideas are also more relevant than they may appear. The discipline is still the "science of difference" (now shorn of the Victorian racial worldview) at a time when the dominant political and intellectual trends-whether globalisation or the new Darwinism-tend to stress the sameness of world culture or the fixity of human nature.
Take globalisation. The fact that Coca-Cola is available everywhere does not mean that drinking it means the same thing in every context, or that it has the same impact on local environments, economies and aesthetics. Hence increased globalism makes the detailed study of the local-something anthropology does best-even more important. "Information is already moving around the world in a way which has completely transformed what it means to be in any one place," says Strathern. The trick is to map which global connections are significant at a particular place and time. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), for example, patent rights became a big issue after a research unit at Harvard University patented a line from a virus taken from the blood of an isolated group of Papua New Guineans, who had rare immunity to certain forms of malaria. Local discussion in PNG drew on the language of discussion in Europe around an EU directive on bio-technology patents-for a moment bringing Brussels closer to Port Moresby than to Singapore. "It is a matter of readjusting one's concept of the far and the near within each context," Strathern argues. "What anthropology can do is examine the way people borrow from one another."
During the 1898 expedition, neither the ethnographers nor the islanders were isolated. The Torres Strait Islands were not cut off from the world; islanders had always traded with neighbours and were part of a world trade in pearl-shell. Even if isolation is defined as "no Europeans living nearby," the islands were not isolated-members of the London Missionary society had moved there in 1871 and stayed. The Haddon expedition was not studying an isolated culture, but one in the middle of change. While some anthropologists over the years have sought out very isolated groups, hidden by dense jungle or high mountains, most have always worked with people in places intimately connected to local, national and even international networks.
The new guard anthropologists argue that the future of the discipline lies in its ability to examine closely the micropolitics of contemporary organisations and government, both at home and abroad; looking at institutions as networks of social relations. As many institutions strive to become more accountable, anthropologists can illuminate their contradictions, conflicts and taboos.
Such work carries its own risks. Most elite institutions are very sensitive to public perception and carefully control their public image. Getting the access necessary for research can be difficult. Moreover, anthropology's long association with the colonised and powerless leaves some unresolved questions when dealing with the powerful. After working with a group for a long time, most anthropologists develop close ties with the people they study. Such empathy may seem honourable when applied to street children in Sudan, but what about executives in the World Bank?
Georgina Born, who recently completed a three-year study of the BBC, describes the experience as far from easy. "BBC managers are generally very defensive, and can be paranoid about their public image." As the BBC itself underwent restructuring, access had to be regularly renegotiated. Gate keepers came and went, and new ones had to be found. Her study is likely to be quite critical. "Good anthropology," she insists, "has to produce criticism as well as appreciation, as my BBC study will show." The anthropologist as management consultant?
If anthropologists can help sort out the BBC, could they not mitigate the "clash of civilisations"? Akbar Ahmed, anthropologist and former Pakistan civil servant, argues that anthropology has been usurped by journalism as the interface between cultures, and when these cultures are in conflict this can be damaging. For Ahmed, the task of the next century is to re-establish anthropologists as the mediators of cultural conflict, particularly between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. He argues that understanding the complexities of, say, Islam, or modern China, requires the skill of an anthropologist: a deep and textured understanding born of objective critique and subjective experience, organised in a sound theoretical framework.
Keith Hart offers a version of this "mediator" role by suggesting that anthropology should become part of a generalised, holistic form of psychotherapy. "It could become a way of relating one's specific personality to the world of humanity in general," he says. "Instead of trying to make sense of the huge array of intermediate social arrangements, we would use anthropology to make a personal Bildungsroman. Anthropology would then be the widest frame for learning, for education, and in that sense a branch of social psychology."
But surely, anthropology's more immediate intellectual purpose and challenge is to act as a counter-weight to the new orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology. A form of reasonable cultural relativism, stressing the enormous variety of human culture and behaviour, is anthropology's gift to intellectual debate. This variety cannot be fully explained by Darwinian evolutionary psychologists, with their homogeneous and ahistorical model of mankind. Similarly, anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that anthropology is a counterpoint to the social sciences' model of a universal rational being. One day, she believes: "The whole thing will break down; social science cannot go on talking about just one kind of rational being, but must become more subtle, complex and flexible."
Conflict may not be necessary. The resurgence of interest in evolution and molecular biology has led to a revitalisation of biological or physical anthropology which, in turn, could provide a bridge between the evolutionary certainties of biology and the malleability explored by social anthropology. Anthropologists, with their detailed knowledge of particular places and people at specific moments in history, can usefully qualify some of the grand claims made in the name of evolutionary theory.
In this way, anthropology comes back to the study of the self: finding oneself in and through others. And if everyone has a culture, then part of discovering yourself is discovering your culture. Or even inventing a new one, if you can convince enough people to join you. "We have become so conscious of culture that anthropology will be centre stage this next century," claims Michael Taussig, of Columbia University. "It will be a Faustian world, with everyone creating and demolishing cultures."
Yet cultures can be surprisingly resilient. In 1898 Haddon led the expedition to record islander culture because it was assumed that it would soon be torn apart by traders, missionaries and colonial officials. However, islander "kastom" (custom) has proved more resilient than Haddon imagined. Cultural revivalism is an important force in Torres Strait life, as are land rights and rugby.
So perhaps this future world of endless creation and destruction of cultures will look rather like the one we already have, and the multiple strands of cultural borrowing in today's world is simply a continuation of a past more complex than we often imagine.
