In the beginning

Although its name indicates an interest in all humankind (anthropos), anthro­pology nevertheless confined itself to earlier and simpler cultures and steered away from the modern.

But it had no substantial successors. With Bronislaw Malinowski and his Revolution in Anthropology, the subject concentrated on the analysis of particu­lar non-literate societies, essentially through fieldwork methods, that is, through observation in a detailed study of a single society. The belief was that aggregating the knowledge of such cultures served to distort them. Since every society was different, comparison was impossible, or possible only among close neighbours. On the face of it, the fields of anthropology and world history moved far apart.

Thus, for many the two fields of history and anthropology have had their place at opposite ends of the academic spectrum. World history involves the consideration of written societies - before, that is, of prehistory. Earlier anthropology concentrated on the study of society before writing, and, therefore, lacked such accounts or observation. It has largely confined comparison to these ‘primitive' and simple societies; however, in the post­world war period it also took its students through the classical sociologists, ^[345] mainly via the works of Durkheim who had himself included ‘simple' societies in his well-known study of the first Australians in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,^[346] as well as touching upon the works of Weber (but hardly Marx).

One might have thought anthropology would have little to do with world history, especially since the functionalists and the structuralists effectively dismissed history as an explanatory factor in the social sciences, it being essential to explain the present by the present in a living organism, in a biological manner.

Drawing the boundary between ‘modern' and ‘traditional' in this way singled out later European societies, as being different from the rest, for example in ‘culture' such as in the development of cuisine and the use of cultivated flowers. However, a brief examination of Indian and Chinese cuisines and restaurant cultures, as well as the use of flowers in their cere­monies and for dress, immediately indicated the kind of complexity that put the cultures on roughly the same level and threw doubts on this division. This was equally the case with communication, with writing. The earlier assump­tions of the uniqueness of the Greek alphabet were questioned by an increas­ing understanding of the eastern varieties and the realization that syllabic and logographic scripts had their own advantages as instruments of communi­cation. They could permit extensive literacy and the development of an elaborate written culture, which in China's case included long ‘realistic' novels and both a philosophical and scientific tradition.

But world history and anthropology are in fact not so distant as was once thought. Historians are trained to examine written documents; their work is in the library rather than the field, that is, with reports of what has happened rather than undertaking first-hand observation, although the category ‘oral history' has rather blurred this issue, since history normally involves written records, not oral accounts. Unless recorded in some way, these oral accounts cannot be rechecked and are therefore evanescent. In both fields, however, there is some tension between the intensive library and archival examination of particular groups or between particular observational studies on the one hand and the wider ‘com­parative' ones that take into account a number of societies, or even all (the ‘world', or perhaps just the Old World, with its written tradition).

At that time, in the 1940s and 1950s, there were few anthropological studies of western societies such as Lloyd Warner's on Newburyport in Massachusetts in 1941 (he had originally worked with the Murngin of Australia),^[350] for Europe was basically out of bounds (except for witchcraft and other ‘survivals'); we studied other cultures, and even societies such as India and China with strong written traditions were held to be in the same category as the ‘primitive', most notably by Durkheim for primitive classification in relation to China,^[351] as well as by Levi-Strauss in relation to marriage,^[352] and for India especially by Dumont in relation to this and to general development.^[353] In drawing this supposed distinction they failed to see the basic similarities even of these other written cultures with Europe that were emphasized by Needham in his magisterial work on China, which he showed was more ‘modern' than earlier Europe.^{[354] [355]} So they drew the line round modern in a thoroughly nineteenth-century way, which was the wrong line in the wrong place, failing to accord sufficient importance to literacy, which was common to all the major Eurasian societies. Indeed when students of anthropology did work in such ‘other cultures', they tended to ignore the written tradition, even to the extent of not knowing how to read its script. They cut themselves off from that aspect of local life and treated it as an ‘oral' culture.

In practice, however, ‘comparative sociology' was a dream; anthropology became nothing of the kind - except with Durkheim's school in France. Indeed it was impossible to marry up intensive and extensive study, and even the tentative steps to considering that possibility led to a conflict between Evans-Pritchard (who had earlier studied history, as had many other early anthropologists) and other social anthropologists. However, he did think wider comparison was possible within the context of ‘Primitive Societies' and ‘Other Cultures' and his students went on to produce a number of general volumes of this kind.¹¹ Nevertheless, comparative volumes were valued very much less than reports on particular societies, which were seen

Anthropology's contribution to world history as presenting the actual data as distinct from aggregate material that fitted some societies but not others. Comparison could distort and there was much concern, for example, about interpreting Dinka concepts of the ‘soul' in Nuer terms. Every culture was different. Yes, but...