Classic Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1944-1996

Classic Anthropology is Bennett's label for the work produced by anthropologists during the period 1915-1955, which many believe represents the most productive era in the discipline's history. It is also one that can never be repeated, given the fact that most of anthropology's basic data - the ideas and customs of tribal peoples - have been extinguished or greatly transformed by modernization and nationalization. The book is composed of some fifteen essays. Among the issues examined are: the emergence of a functionalist viewpoint in ethnology; the difficulties of developing a theory of human behavior because of the focus on culture; the "search" for concepts of culture to serve specialized needs; the neglect of social psychology by the "culture and personality" field; how value judgments emerged, willy-nilly - or conversely, were neglected, in ethnological research; how applied anthropology was challenged by "Action Anthropology"; and how the interdisciplinary anthropology of the late 1940s was submerged in the postwar effort to return the discipline to traditionalroots. Individual anthropologists whose work is examined include, among others. Bronislaw Malinowski, Leslie Spier, Alfred Kroeber, Ralph Linton, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, Gregory Bateson, and Walter Taylor.