History of Theory and Method in Anthropology

Regna Darnell

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496232243
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Regna Darnell offers a critical reexamination of the theoretical orientation of the Americanist tradition, centered on the work of Franz Boas, and the professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology reveals the theory schools, institutions, and social networks of scholars and fieldworkers primarily interested in the ethnography of North American Indigenous peoples. Darnell's fifty-year career entails foundational writings in the four fields of the discipline: cultural anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology. Leading researchers, theorists, and fieldwork subjects include Claude Lévi-Strauss, Franz Boas, Benjamin Lee Whorf, John Wesley Powell, Frederica de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George Stocking Jr., and Anthony F.C. Wallace, as well as nineteenth-century Native language classifications, ethnography, ethnohistory, social psychology, structuralism, rationalism, biologism, mentalism, race science, human nature and cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, standpoint-based epistemology, collaborative research, and applied anthropology. History of Theory and Method in Anthropology is an essential volume for scholars and undergraduate and graduate students to enter into the history of the inductive theory schools and methodologies of the Americanist tradition and its legacies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Method
• Introduction
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. What Is History?
• 2. Applied Anthropology
• 3. The Anthropological Concept of Culture at the End of the Boasian Century
• 4. Calibrating Discourses across Cultures in Search of Common Ground
• 5. “Keeping the Faith”
• 6. Anthropological Approaches to Human Nature, Cultural Relativism, and Ethnocentrism
• 7. Text, Symbol, and Tradition in Northwest Coast Ethnology from Franz Boas to Claude Lévi-Strauss
• 8. Mind, Body, and the Native Point of View
• 9. Franz Boas as Theorist
• 10. The Powell Classification of American Indian Languages
• 11. The Revision of the Powell Classification
• 12. Désveaux, Two Traditions of Anthropology in Mirror
• 13. Rationalism, the (Sapir-)Whorf Hypothesis, and Assassination by Anachronism
• 14. The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss
• 15. Obituary for Frederica de Laguna (1906–2004)
• 16. Obituary for Dell Hathaway Hymes (1927–2009)
• 17. Obituary for George W. Stocking Jr. (1928–2013)
• 18. Review of Glimpses into My Own Black Box
• 19. Obituary for Anthony F. C. Wallace (1923–2015)
• Index
• About Regna Darnell
• Series List