ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four periods in the history of anthropology: formative, classical, modern, and global. Each period has been shaped by major changes in the world political economy. The chapter sketches the first three of these periods and describes how each conditioned its corresponding anthropology to construct a distinctive type of other. Whereas in the first two periods anthropology gave place of privilege to the primitive, in the third it constructed the peasant as an object of anthropological scrutiny. Anthropology took form as a distinct discipline in the encounter of 'Western' societies with peoples in 'peripheral' regions. In this formative period, it fell mainly to anthropology to explain such exotic, distant others that were seen as existing at the geographic and social antipodes of the West. The consolidation of the classical phase of anthropology was a notable humanistic advance with respect to the way in which the primitive other was represented in anthropological texts.
