The Boasians by Adams William Y.;

Author:Adams, William Y.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Published: 2012-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ethnographic Method and Theory

The Method and Theory of Ethnology (1933) is one of three books written by Radin exclusively for anthropologists. It stands out sharply from all his other work, and is one of the most sweeping and profound theoretical critiques written by any American anthropologist.

The first two chapters are devoted respectively to Boas and to the work of his main students. The principal criticism is the same in both cases, that they are trying to be simultaneously scientists and historians, but not succeeding at either. Culture traits, says Radin, are not scientific facts, and reconstructions of cultural diffusion are not history. The author seems to be saying that the ethnologist should declare himself unequivocally either scientist or humanist, and stick to it. The third chapter discusses a number of European anthropological schools, but primarily the British and German. The British are criticized on various grounds (there is clearly more than one school under discussion), the Germans for being too preoccupied with the single issue of diffusion vs. independent invention. The author goes on briefly to applaud the Dutch, Danish, and Russian ethnologists for their purely humanistic approach. Curiously, there is no mention of the French sociological school until near the end of the final chapter, although it had been well established for a generation.

Chapter IV, titled “Factors in the Determination of the Ethnological Record,” is basically a critique of the methodology of salvage ethnography, in which a single investigator gleans as much information as he/she can from the memories of one or a very few elderly informants, recalling what their own elders had told them. Radin correctly points out that although there were vast differences in theoretical perspective between the Boasians and their Smithsonian (BAE) predecessors, their field methods and their objectives were precisely the same. The limitations of such an approach, describing something no longer actually in existence, are too obvious to need elaboration, but Radin does not sufficiently acknowledge that the need, in the case of vanishing cultures and even whole peoples, was immediate and critical, and for many peoples it had to be salvage ethnography or nothing. More to the point, he does not acknowledge that in most of his Winnebago ethnography he was doing the same thing himself.

Chapter V, “The Quantitative Method in Ethnology,” is somewhat misleadingly titled. Radin does not use the term “quantitative method” in the narrowly statistical sense, but to designate the basic method of all social science, the inference of generalities on the basis of frequency. If ethnology is to be any kind of science at all it can only be normative, and this is precisely what Radin objects to. Chapter VI, “The Reaction Against the Quantitative Method,” actually deals with several different reactions: the functionalism of Malinowski, the strict social reductionism of Radcliffe-Brown, and the pure, impressionistic humanism of Benedict and Mead.

Chapter VII, “Reconstruction from Internal Evidence and the Role of the Individual,” turns finally from criticism to advocacy. There are two essential points: that culture history should be reconstructed

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