ABSTRACT
Recent initiatives in cultural anthropology are importantly inflected by—and often opposed to—preceding theoretical legacies. To provide some context for these complexities, selected stories about anthropology’s theoretical past provide a convenient point of departure. 1 These stories are not neutral or balanced in coverage. They compress and telescope, emphasizing the well-known, on the one hand, and the strains most relevant for current sensibilities, on the other. Somewhere between fact and myth, variants of these stories are often told by anthropologists about themselves; they encode basic perceptions that can be useful for pedagogical purposes and initial awareness. Unavoidably broad, they use basic themes to sweep across territory that is more complicated on a closer view. The same is true of individual authors; their reification as icons of particular approaches belies the nuances that should lead one back to the specifics and diversity of their works. It is important for students to realize that all of the authors considered below need to be read and considered more deeply. As Jack Goody (1995:208) reminds us, “lumping together anthropologists and ideas in single categories makes it difficult to understand their work.” Even as the following stories reveal themselves to be inadequate, their shortcomings provide a context for considering current views, which is the larger purpose of this book. As will become evident, the status of “stories” versus “histories” is itself a subject of much debate in recent attempts to theorize culture and representation. For simplicity, we can start with high modernist strains of cultural anthropology and then consider them against trajectories that are more recent and those that are more historically distant.
