European Anthropologies

In what ways did Europeans interact with the diversity of people they encountered on other continents in the context of colonial expansion, and with the peasant or ethnic ‘Other’ at home? How did anthropologists and ethnologists make sense of the mosaic of people and societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when their disciplines were progressively being established in academia? By assessing the diversity of European intellectual histories within sociocultural anthropology, this volume aims to sketch its intellectual and institutional portrait. It will be a useful reading for the students of anthropology, ethnology, history and philosophy of science, research and science policy makers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785336089

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CHAPTER

1

AT THE PORTUGUESE CROSSROADS

Contemporary Anthropology and its History

SUSANA DE MATOS VIEGAS AND JOÃO DE PINA-CABRAL

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, we argue that anthropology in Portugal at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a diverse and successful discipline that has found its distinctive voice. The path that led to this state of affairs can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. In order to understand the discipline’s substantive development, we suggest that one has to be attentive to two orders of phenomena – we call them the political and the epistemic axes.

The epistemic axis has its opposite poles in the humanist and the positivist traditions as they developed in nineteenth century Europe. The political axis stretches the discipline (albeit at times under different names) between two large-scale State projects. In the Portuguese case, these were mutually dependent: nation-building and empire-building. Over the century, political circumstances dictated which of these State projects gained more currency; however both successfully coexisted throughout the history of the discipline.

The singular position in which Portuguese anthropology finds itself today is the product, among other factors, of a particular linguistic situation that marked its development. Academic writing in Portuguese has increased enormously over the decades, since a number of vibrant anthropological traditions, notably the Brazilian one, use this language for establishing their conceptual and methodological frameworks. This does not exclude Portuguese anthropology from the broader international dialogue but it does create a viable alternative to the domination of English-language anthropology – thus allowing it to exercise a ‘non-hegemonic cosmopolitanism’. The shift of interest towards a focus on the Portuguese-speaking world (alongside with an increased interest in urban as well as historical and archival research) is one of the outcomes of this process. Having said this, however, the overall optimistic picture of the discipline’s development that we present in this chapter is tainted by the spectre of the ‘austerity’ crisis that has affected negatively all the social sciences and humanities in the peripheral countries of Europe.

As stressed above, ever since its inception in the second half of the nineteenth century, academic anthropology (broadly defined as the study of the human condition) has had to integrate two tensional axes of polarization: one relating to preoccupations of an epistemic nature, the other to matters of political representation. Concerning the political axis, anthropology was asked to provide the intellectual ground for the existence of human collective entities: peoples (folk), nations, ethnicities. European anthropology was called to address the constitution of the nation as much as that of the empire.¹ Here, particularly in continental Europe, where the national bourgeoisie was in power, a group of intellectuals that defined itself as cosmopolitan needed to capture the essence of those in whose name it ruled: either the folk or the natives of the empire.² These were always perceived as differentiated voices, whose only chance of being generalized in terms of a national or an imperial voice was through the mediation of the ruling bourgeoisie. The possibility of imperial rule required a capacity to describe those one ruled at home quite as much as those one ruled abroad. As a discourse on the nature of humanity, throughout late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, academic anthropology always found itself caught up between these two poles of the political axis. At times and in places where an extra-European empire was less relevant, the call of folklore and ethnology made itself felt in stronger terms; at other times and in places where an extra-European empire became more relevant, the anthropology of remote peoples came to dominate the discipline.

Concerning the epistemic axis, anthropology faced more universalistic preoccupations. Whilst divine causation had been abandoned within the academic enterprise from the mid nineteenth century, the philosophical underpinnings upon which academic anthropology built itself at the time of the Belle Époque were solidly neo-Cartesian and later neo-Kantian. The separation between man’s bodily condition and man’s mental condition was taken for granted. Whilst the two were ultimately supposed to be co-derived, they required different modes of apprehension and different forms of analysis.

From the beginning, therefore, the emergent field of the scientific study of mankind found itself divided between those who gave a greater emphasis to values, meanings and narratives and those who gave greater emphasis to rules, functions and institutions. Humanistically inspired anthropology, based on philology and cultural ethnology, found itself confronted by scientifically inspired positivist anthropology. The relationship between the two tendencies was ever one of tension and interdependency. For as long as they remained within the modernist worldview, Darwinian naturalism united the two undertakings in spite of the fact that they were pulled apart by Cartesian epistemology, where body and mind never fully resolved themselves into each other. The general universalist framework – that is, the intellectual investment in formulating a common human condition – is what kept the two poles of each of the axes from ever splitting asunder giving rise to a disciplinary field (albeit under different designations).

In light of this (see Figure 1.1), we can observe that, in the political axis, empire-building and nation-building (volkerkunde and volkskunde) have tended permanently towards subdisciplinary specialization without ever fully achieving it; whilst, at the same time, in the epistemic axis, the positivistic endeavour to find the determination of social behaviour within a rule-oriented framework never fully abandoned the engagement with philological and interpretative approaches. Anthropology as an academic enterprise over the past two centuries has found itself often in a dilemma, where each practitioner and each local school have been challenged by the particular mix of the four drives that other practitioners and other schools have advocated. Something, however, did come to unite the field and that was what we might call, in continuation of Adam Kuper’s well-known argument (1988), the primitivist paradigm. Primitivism emerged as a methodological strategy for the broader project of identifying a human condition round about the 1860s (Pina-Cabral 2017a: 27, 47). As has often been observed, this position postulated that something that is elemental (i.e., it cannot be further reduced) is necessarily simple and, since human society was supposed to have evolved from a simpler condition towards a more sophisticated, civilized condition, what was primitive was also anterior. Thus, if one studied forms of human life that were simpler, one would also be able to identify the analytical elements of human life and one would have access to the past. Anthropology could, therefore, reach to the past. It could overcome the limitations of coevalness (see Fabian 1983) and achieve universality.

Figure 1.1. The two axes of definition of the anthropological endeavour

The paradigm of primitive society, thus, succeeded in integrating preoccupations with both law and institutions, on the one hand, and values and narratives, on the other, through theories of the joint evolution of family and religion (see Kuper 1988). By reference to the political axis, however, the matter positioned itself differently depending on the particular political and social conditions of each European society where anthropology was being developed. In particular, in continental Europe, as in Portugal, the integration between nation and empire was carried out under the aegis of a national ruling bourgeoisie, which was not the case in England. The ultimate separation between an ethnological (nation-building) project and an anthropological (empire-building) project, which occurred at the Royal Anthropological Institute in the late 1930s, never occurred throughout continental Europe, where the two modes of anthropology remain deeply intertwined to this day.

In this chapter, we suggest a reading of the formation of anthropology in Portugal that develops on this observation that ‘nation-building’ and ‘empire-building’ were never very far from each other and tended to fade into one another. In fact, in the Portuguese case, at the end of the nineteenth century and up to the 1970s, possessing an empire was a defining condition for the survival of a European nationhood project (cf. Pina-Cabral and Feijó 2002). In this sense, we distance ourselves slightly from the more polarized interpretations that have been inspired by the work of George Stocking Jr. (1982). For the Portuguese case, João Leal’s historical analysis has broadly represented this position (2000, 2001, 2006, 2008). He subsumes the history of anthropology in Portugal under the driving force of the ‘nation-building’