Doing Field Projects. John Forrest

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СКАЧАТЬ three-age system, or the movement from Stone Age to Bronze Age to Iron Age, was once seen as an obvious and inevitable sequential progression. There is a simple, although flawed, logic which governs the three-stage progression, as follows. The first humans used rocks to make their tools for cutting, mashing, scraping, and killing because rocks and muscle power were all they had at the outset. They would have used wood, bones, and vines also, of course, but stone tools are what remain in the archeological record, so the era was dubbed the Stone Age. This era saw numerous innovations, including the domestication of plants and animals. Thus, it was eventually divided into the Old Stone Age (or Paleolithic), the period before domestication, and the New Stone Age (or Neolithic), the period after domestication. Domestication of plants led to sedentism because people had to stay in one place to cultivate their crops. Sedentary peoples could build permanent structures which migratory or nomadic foragers could not. These included ovens for baking that could also be used for firing pottery. Subsequently, these peoples could control heat sufficiently to smelt metals. Copper and tin were smelted first because they have low melting points. Thus, they could produce bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) to make tools which are superior to stone tools … and so it goes.

      Archeologists now see that the three-age system is neither applicable to all cultures worldwide nor as logical a series of steps as once appeared obvious. Some cultures never developed metallurgy indigenously, yet they managed to evolve in complex ways sociopolitically. Some cultures had a distinct copper-using era (the Chalcolithic) in between their Stone and Bronze Ages. Some cultures skipped over the Bronze Age entirely and moved directly from stone tools to iron ones. The possibilities are seemingly endless, and what was once presumed to be a series of inevitable advancements taken in logical steps is now seen to be a much more fluid and malleable process, influenced by a variety of variables including geography and contact with other cultures. In the nineteenth century, however, such nuances were less well known because both archeological methods and ethnographic fieldwork were in their infancy. Reliable data were scarce.

      While the 1870s were productive in North America in some spheres of ethnographic fieldwork, such as Morgan’s extensive collection of kinship data, first from the Iroquois (Morgan 1851), and later from the Winnebago, Crow, Yankton, Kaw, Blackfeet, Omaha, and others (Morgan 1871), there were two significant problems with the research. First, Morgan relied almost exclusively on interviews, which meant that the information which he collected had no cultural context with which to frame it and, hence, make sense of it, and, second, because there was a physical and intellectual separation between museum departments, which were engaged in field expeditions, and university teaching departments of anthropology, which might have been bastions of ethnographic theory but were virtually nonexistent. Consequently, field data did not translate into theory within a university environment. Morgan never held an academic position but, almost by default (there being no rivals in academia), his paradigm of universal cultural evolution held center stage, and was heavily relied upon by all manner of theorists, from Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud, to buttress their own theories of social development.

The three-age system of archeology, and hence cultural evolution, has the concept of progress built into it. Evolution in other academic spheres does not imply that the processes under study which are evolving are also progressing. For example, Modern English is not better than Middle English or Old English in any absolute sense. Each form of the language suits the needs of the people using them in their respective eras. Likewise, marble is not better than limestone even though it is the metamorphosed form of limestone. Both rocks serve their purposes. The verbs “evolve” and “change” in these contexts are almost exact synonyms, and the scholars in biology, geology, and linguistics understood this idea. Unfortunately, the three-age system of Old World archeology, when transformed into a full-blown theory of cultural evolution, can carry with it the notion that cultures advance or improve as they move through the stages. Not surprisingly, in the nineteenth century the idea of “progress” in both archeology and sociocultural anthropology was equated with technological advancements, as befits a world that was rapidly changing (“advancing” in their terms) under the powerful thrust of the Industrial Revolution, thus placing technology at the center of cultural analysis in anthropology.

      The nineteenth century also saw the pinnacle of European colonialism across the globe. This colonialism was fueled by greed, and supported by racist assumptions that colonized peoples were inferior to their colonial masters and, therefore, could be exploited with impunity. To be profitable, industries in Europe, especially Britain, needed cheap raw materials and cheap labor, which colonialism provided in abundance. Slavery was an outgrowth of the colonial system, justified by a stance that non-European peoples were inferior, racially and culturally to Europeans. Civilizing them was the “White man’s burden.” The anthropology that developed in Europe in the early twentieth century was profoundly shaped by this colonialist mentality in complex ways, especially within the imperial holdings of European nations.

      Off the Verandah and into the Colonies

      At the beginning of the twentieth century, British anthropologists started to emulate their colleagues in North America by journeying well away from home to conduct fieldwork. The turning point for British anthropology was the Torres Straits expedition of 1898 led by psychologist-turned-anthropologist, W.H.R. Rivers, and including C.G. Seligman, who later taught Bronislaw Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes. The Torres Straits lie between the northern tip of Queensland in Australia and the southeastern shores of Papua New Guinea, and their indigenous island peoples are culturally and linguistically distinct from either, and from each other.

      The six members of the expedition were an assortment of psychologists, linguists, and ethnologists, and their preferred method of fieldwork was interviewing as well as taking physical measurements. In the process, Rivers discovered that the people he interviewed had the same visual abilities as Europeans, yet had no word for the color blue, and used the same word for blue things as for black things. Likewise, they did not have words to distinguish biological siblings and cousins. Inspired by his work in the Torres Straits, Rivers spent several months in 1901–2 among the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills of southern India.

At the time the Todas numbered about 700 individuals living in relative seclusion from other south Indian cultures. They were a polyandrous (one woman with multiple husbands) society divided into moieties who lived primarily on buffalo pastoralism and dairying – which involved a number of complex religious ceremonies, all meticulously noted by Rivers and eventually published in The Todas (1906). In the preface he writes that his work is “not merely the record of the customs and beliefs of a people, but also the demonstration of anthropological method” (Rivers 1906: v). The first 11 chapters are an extremely detailed description of the dairy cult and its priests among the Todas, but then it trails off into generalities concerning gods, magic, kinship, clanship, crime, and so on, and does not integrate these descriptions with his analysis of pastoralism. Furthermore, he failed to document the existence of matrilineal clans alongside the patrilineal ones. The problem was that he had to use an interpreter to communicate with the Todas, and he lived in a hotel the entire time – leading to what is sometimes called “verandah ethnography” – the replacement for armchair anthropology. That is, anthropologists now journeyed away from their cloistered libraries to far-flung locations and peoples, but then interviewed them on hotel verandahs rather than living with them in their own villages, one-to-one. Bronislaw Malinowski changed all of that.

      According to Malinowski’s later recounting of the story of how he developed participant-observation fieldwork, his inspiration began while attending Jagiellonian University in Kraków in Poland, pursuing a doctorate in physics and mathematics. He became bedridden with an illness, and during his convalescence he began to read Frazer’s Golden Bough. Taken by the ideas in the work, he abandoned his current track (after the doctorate) and went to the University of Leipzig in Germany, where he studied economics and psychology, and then in 1910 went to England to study anthropology at the London School of Economics under C.G. Seligman.

      Malinowski СКАЧАТЬ