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The Place of Theory in Anthropological Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Clyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
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Extract

It is probably true that the greater number of contemporary American anthropologists feel that “theory” is a very dangerous kind of business which the careful anthropologist must be on his guard against. This statement represents, in the first instance, merely a crude induction from my experience in talking with professional anthropologists. It is, however, symptomatic that not until 1933 did a book by an American anthropologist include the word “theory” in its title. Only a single book published subsequently is explicitly given over to anthropological theory, and this avowedly concentrates upon the historical development of theories rather than upon a fresh and extended analysis of the more abstract aspects of anthropological thought. But because anthropology still painfully remembers the stomach-ache it got from the too easy generalizations of many nineteenth century “arm-chair ethnologists” is insufficient reason, it seems to me, for that almost morbid avoidance of theory which tends to produce acute indigestion from sheer bulk of unordered concrete observations. Landheer has with some justice commented:

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , July 1939 , pp. 328 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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References

Notes

1 Paul Radin, The Method and Theory of Ethnology (New York, 1933).

2 R. H. Lowic, History of Ethnological Theory (New York, 1937). (It is convenient to confine the discussion to the work of American anthropologists, and others will be mentioned only incidentally.)

3 B. Landheer, Presupposition in the Social Sciences (American Journal of Sociology, vol. 37, 1932, pp. 539-546).

4 I am aware that some philosophers of science maintain that all science is (or ought to be) description. But in so doing they inflate considerably the ordinary extension of the concept—specifically, they include the ordering and analysis of data, as well as the cataloguing of characteristics of separate percepts. To put the matter somewhat differently they urge that science must concern itself with only the first two of Aristotle's causes—must only attempt to answer the questions “what?” and “how?” I employ the word “description” in the narrower sense—not including the establishment of relations between data, other than those given in the process of primary perception.

5 Poincaré, Science et Methode, (Paris, 1909) p. 12.

6 B. Malinowski, Article, Social Anthropology, (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edition, vol. 20) p. 864.

7 H. W. B. Joseph, Essays in Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Oxford, 1935), p. 31.

8 A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York, 1933), p. 198.

9 W. T. Stace, Metaphysics and Meaning (Mind, vol. 34, pp. 417-439), p. 422.

10 Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937), p. 8. I should like to acknowledge at this point my great general debt to my colleague, Professor Parsons, with regard to my thinking on the topics on which this paper touches.

11 Radin, op. cit., p. xi.

12 W. D. Strong, Anthropological Theory and Archaeological Fact, (Essays in Anthropology in Honor of Alfred Louis Kroeber, Berkeley, 1936, pp. 359-371), p. 368. 13 Joseph (op. cit.), p. 304.

14 L. Bloomfield, Language (New York, 1933), p. 3.

15 American Anthropologist, vol. 22, 1920, pp. 311-321.

16 Op. cit., p. 152.

17 Ibid., pp. 128-155.

18 In: The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. I, p. 185.

19 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Present Position of Anthropological Studies (Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, London, 1931, pp. 141-171), p. 150.

20 Ibid., p. 157.

21 Which he reiterates both directly and inferentially time without number in the work referred to and in other places.

22 V. A. Gorodzov, The Typological Method in Archaeology (American Anthropologist, vol. 35, 1933, pp. 95-103).

23 For a preliminary exploration of the concept “configuration” as used in anthropology see John Gillin, The Configuration Problem in Culture, (American Sociological Review, vol. I, 1936, pp. 373-387). It is not, I think, without meaning that this and other papers on theory by anthropologists (such as Kroeber, Wallis, Thurnwald) which have appeared during the past few years have been published in sociological rather than anthropological journals.

24 New York, 1936.

25 It is noteworthy in anthropology at the moment that (with a few noteworthy exceptions) one must leap from the minutiae of monographic studies to semi-popular or popular books. The literature on the ethnology of the North American Indians, for example, has reached tremendous proportions, but there is simply no professionally acceptable synthesis of the German “Handbuch” type. The comparative lack of synthetic “library research” in anthropology is, of course, a separate question from that which is here the centre of our interest, but it is clearly very closely related to certain rather general attitudes which seem to me manifestations of the “occupational psychosis” of anthropologists.

26 Margaret Mead, More Comprehensive Field Methods (American Anthropologist, vol. 35, 1933. pp. 1-16).

27 A. L. Kroeber, History and Science in Anthropology (American Anthropologist, vol. 37, pp. 539-570). p. 547.

28 See V. F. Calverton, Modern Anthropology and the Theory of Cultural Compulsives (In: the Making of Man, V. F. Calverton ed., New York, 1931, pp. 1-41).

29 Bloomfield (op. cit.), p. 2.

30 J. Mayer, The Techniques, Basic Concepts, and Preconceptions of Science and Their Relations to Social Study (Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, pp. 431-484).

31 I have up to this point deliberately abstained from giving an extended dictionary type definition of “theory.” By using the word, by pointing to various relationships I have tried to establish the appropriate “context of situation.” For a dictionary type of definition I would suggest approximately the following: “Theory” refers to a statement or statements of somewhat abstract nature covering the relationships between a number of discrete facts. The differentia of “theory” is primarily that the validity of operations of reasoning is at stake as well as the correctness of operations of perception. Theory is dependent upon the logic of inference. Theories depend upon inferences from observation, but cannot themselves be observed directly.