Anthropology has changed a lot over the years - early anthropology is characterized by a strong sense of ethnocentrism, to being heavily influenced by evolutionary theories. Imperialism and colonialism, too, color many early anthropological works. Later on, with burgeoning cultural relativism, a more modern approach started taking form, and anthropologists started to criticize their own works and ways of interacting with other cultures and people.
In this first part of my essay I will be focusing on how the attitude of anthropologists has changed in regards to others’ worlds of thought, as well as notions of magic and religion. I’m curious to see how different anthropologists have engaged with these topics and with each other, and I will discuss this by utilizing texts where the authors have different views, opinions, and ways of writing; Bronislaw Malinowski’s Magic, Science, and Religion (Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays, 1948) which also discusses the work of Edward B. Tylor, Horace Miner’s Body Ritual Among the Nacirema (American Anthropologist, 1956), and Robert H. Lowie’s The Vision Quest Among the North American Indians.
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Malinowski and Tylor
Malinowski credits the foundation of anthropological study to Edward B. Tylor, who coined a theory about animism - The belief that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks, cliffs, hills,and rivers are animated by spiritual forces or beings - and believing it to be the essence of “primitive” religion. Tylor strongly believed in the evolutionary theory and applied it on religion by thinking that religious evolution developed in the following way: animism - polytheism - monotheism. In Magic Science, and Religion, Malinowski writes that Tylor believed that “primitive” man “has a tendency to imagine the outer world in his own image. And since animals, plants, plants and objects move, act, behave, help man or hinder him, they must also be endowed with souls or spirits.”. Malinowski quickly denounces this theory, claiming that though it was important to the science, it was based on too thin a scope of realities, and “made early man too contemplative and rational”. Malinowski, a functionalist, believed instead that magic, ritual, and religion all served to fulfill different roles in the individual. About magic, he writes that “(...) He clings to it, whenever he has to recognize the impotence of his knowledge and of his rational technique”, and about religious rites surrounding death: “...These (religious) acts confirm his hope that there is a hereafter, that it is not worse than present life; indeed, better.”
The words “primitive” and “savage” are common in Malinowski’s text, the latter common in conjunction with “races”. While this way of expressing oneself is deeply problematic today, Malinowski is arguably, for his time, progressive in regards to equality - something that becomes evident when reading his text, as he stresses that he draws conclusions from his own fieldwork, and participant observation - empirically proven.
Horace and Lowie
Another anthropologist who one can consider ”progressive” is Horace Miner, who in his text Body Ritual Among the Nacirema set out to challenge his fellow anthropologist’s ethnocentric, interpreting way of construing other cultures. When an outsider describes and analyzes another culture they can warp it until it’s barely recognizable even to one who already has knowledge of the culture. To exhibit this he describes the American (Nacirema) society as a different anthropologist might describe a strange one, ethnocentrism constantly present in the ways he puts judgment in the Nacirema people’s customs. Miner ends the text with a jab at Malinowski, writing that the exotic customs, that Miner finds hard to understand how the Nacirema have survived so long with, take on real meaning with the insight Malinowski’s provided in earlier works.
When I first read Miner’s text I was unaware of the actual meaning - not having stopped to consider the anagram - and was shocked by these people who willingly mutilated and changed their bodies out of shame. My reaction proves that we have, by reading earlier and current anthropologists works, normalized a fantastical way of describing other cultures, and may often fail to give critical evaluation to works - instead taking the author’s word as fact.
With a renewed wish to look critically upon anthropological texts I approached Robert H. Lowie’s The Vision Quest Among the North American Indians, a work studying Native Americans, especially the Crow, - living on the same continent as the Nacirema - as they attempt to contact the supernatural by inducing visions. Lowie seems to watch his actors as if they are in a play and he is there to interpret it, openly judging their own beliefs and putting his own on top of them. “There is no doubt that the vast majority of informants firmly believed in the reality of the experiences they described”, he writes, and follows it up by attempting to put their experiences down to natural causes; intense emotions, seclusion, fasting, as well as being influenced by previous people’s visions - Lowie gives many reasons as to why his informants may have visions, yet does not entertain the thought that it may be anything more. This shows an ethnocentric attitude, an anthropologists attempting to make sense of a different culture from his own experience
Like Eriksen writes in the chapter Religion and Ritual, anthropologists still struggle today to define religion, and have done so during the science’s existence. It is no wonder that they squabble among themselves while attempting to define it, and no wonder that they judge each other’s ways of approaching it. It seems, however, that this constant fighting have done much good for the discipline. From Tylor, to Malinowski, to Lowie, and finally Miner, they all have different ways of viewing other civilizations and their customs, and they all have learned from the previous one’s mistakes. While anthropology’s past is problematic, the area of study has grown immensely during the last 100 years, and will continue to do so. I am looking forward to reading a criticism of Horace Miner, and a criticism of that criticism, and so on.
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