ABSTRACT
Over the last half-century social anthropologists have I taken a more dynamic view of their problems. Fifty years ago the communities they studied were often almost isolated from the civilized world. The people in them might still be using stone axes, wearing bark-cloth, ignorant of reading and writing and the use of coinage, and be practising an economy which, if not entirely self-subsistent, did not depend on production for a Western market. The anthropologists’ study of the “savage” could include material on head-hunting in the Solomon Islands, killing of twins in Africa, or strangling of widows in Fiji, without it being thought that he was a sensation-monger delving into the memories of an almost forgotten past. But the antithesis between the apparently unprogressive primitive and the self-consciously developing civilized man was so strong that the anthropologist tended to assume too easily that he was dealing with static conditions. Even where he made such an assumption merely as a device to make his analysis simpler, he tended to express his results as if they had a timeless quality. They created the impression that they were meant to convey the permanent essence of a people's life. Some textbooks still carry on this fiction of stasis. They speak, for instance, of the totemism of the central Australians or the shamanism of the Siberians as if these had remained unaltered since they were described at the turn of the century. Discussion in this “ethnographic present” can be justified when it is simply a comparison of abstract types that is wanted. But the use of this tense has often meant a disregard of dating and sequences, a lack of that sense of history which a social anthropologist should have if he is to do justice to his records and be of proper help to his successors. With such a process of literary embalming, it is sometimes even impossible to find, as in some accounts of Oceanic culture, whether or not a custom has died out. Even where some radical change in the social institutions of a people could not be passed over, as with the disappearance of head-hunting in the Solomons, the anthropologist was apt to take a retrospective, even nostalgic, point of view. He was more concerned with what had been lost than with the positive implications of the change. The removal of incentives to the building of large canoes formerly needed for the head-taking raids drew more attention than the new possibilities for social intercourse in peaceful conditions or the effects of the development of coastal as against hinterland settlements as the fear of war receded.
