Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._4

brain. As a consequence, it tends to express itself even in times and places where mating need not have reproductive consequences. For millions of years, and even today in much of the world, an unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy with a partner who will contribute little or nothing to the wellbeing of the offspring may consume a large portion of a woman’s reproductive potential. In summary, women go for quality; men, for the allure of quantity.

A study of 10,047 individuals living in various countries on six continents strongly suggests that culture has a notable influence on mate preferences and that the two sexes agree on some of the basic requirements of a good mate, such as honesty and dependability. However, the findings also reveal some marked universal differences that are predictable from the law of anisogamy. For instance, females are significantly more likely than males to emphasize ambition and industriousness. Conversely, males more than females prefer mates who are physically attractive, younger than themselves, and at the peak of their reproductive value even if they are of lower socioeconomic status (Buss 1989).

The sexual selection (SS) corollary may be stated in Trivers’s (1972, p. 140) words as follows: ‘‘Individuals of the sex investing less will compete among themselves to breed with members of the sex investing more, since an individual of the former can increase its reproductive success by investing successfully in the offspring of several members of the limiting sex.’’

The idea of sexual selection is a remarkable example of great ideas that emerge out of creative confusion. Darwin understood that in the final analysis the measure of survival is reproductive success. Nevertheless, he tended to focus on survival as longevity. As a result, certain observations, both behavioral and physical, confronted him with a special challenge. Why the great horns, the displays, the mimicry, the special weapons, ‘‘the instrumental music,’’ or, among other male characteristics, the huge tail of the peacock? Such unusual features tend to attract predators and thus reduce longevity. Darwin (1859, but especially 1871) concluded that if such ‘‘secondary sexual characters’’ enhance the bearers’ ability to reproduce, they are likely to be favored by natural selection even if they act negatively on longevity. However, because

such characters were conspicuous in sexual competition, they suggested to him the label ‘‘sexual selection.’’ There is some debate over the meaning of this term (see Mayr 1972 for a review), but it is safe to say that it refers not to a type of selection but instead to a major cause of natural selection. ‘‘After all,’’ as Dobzhansky et al. (1977, p. 118) noted, ‘‘Darwinian fitness is reproductive fitness,’’ whatever the cause. Sexual selection, or competition for mates, refers most explicitly to the struggle for genetic survival. It further suggests that much animal behavior and appearance are adapted not so much to the problem of daily survival as to the job of securing adequate mates.

Viewed as competition, sexual selection has become a valuable tool of research, especially in view of certain distinctions suggested by Darwin himself. In current language there are two major types of sexual selection. One, often termed ‘‘intrasexual selection,’’ subsumes a female-female competition and a male-male one. The other refers to a form of male-male competition, too (the competition ‘‘to charm the females’’), but Darwin viewed it as an effect of the females’ response to ‘‘charm.’’ Accordingly, it has come to be known as female choice (or ‘‘intersexual selection’’). It is evident that differential parental investment and sexual selection are closely linked properties of anisogamy. In fact, one may combine the logic of DPI and SS to state what may be termed the DPI-SS corollary as follows: Given anisogamy, females have been selected to engage in choosy behavior, while males have been selected to specialize in agonistic behavior.

Female choosiness in human beings takes many forms. This article has mentioned the tendency to prefer resource-rich mates. As a group, even in a highly developed society like the United States, women pay less attention to looks, have and claim to want fewer sexual partners, are less likely to have their first sexual experience with a stranger, are more likely to expect a commitment before engaging in sex, and among many other differences, are less likely to cheat on their mates, whether husbands, cohabitors, or boyfriends (Laumann et al. 1994).

Competitiveness, too, takes many forms. One is reflected in the ancient and still fairly common practice of polygyny, especially if one considers the greater tendency of divorced men to remarry and have further children (Betzig 1986; Lenski

and Lenski 1987). Another form is expressed in violent behavior. Killing, for example, is throughout the world a largely male behavior and is concentrated among young men during the peak years of their reproductive life. Prominent among the motives for homicide are sexual jealousy and rivalry as wall as dominance contests in various contexts (Daly and Wilson 1988). Death by trauma (murder and accidents) accounts for a relatively high percentage of male mortality and part of the lower life expectancy of men (Verbrugge 1989). Of course, there are many other forms of competitiveness, and women are not immune to the tendency to practice them.

Of Sex Roles. Sociological practice is almost entirely environmentalist and often clashes with an evolutionary perspective. For example, according to ‘‘feminist’’ authors, especially so-called gender feminists, men and women are born with identical potentials. The idea that, given anisogamy, the brain has been neuroendocrinally gendered (Kimura 1992) is extraneous if not altogether offensive to them. They argue conversely that society is ruled by a system of patriarchy, and socialization thus proceeds to produce differences that are detrimental to women. Girls are socialized to be passive and subordinate, while boys are trained to strive for success and dominance (Lerner 1986, p. 29). In short, so-called sex roles are the effect of culturally prescribed discrimination and must be explained in terms of cultural causes only. Some writers go so far as to argue that physiology is irrelevant or that ‘‘human physiology is socially constructed and gendered’’ (Lorber 1994, p. 46; emphasis added).

Sociobiologists do not deny that once an arrangement such as patriarchy is in place, the channels of socialization tend to develop in view of its mandates. However, science does not merely assert facts; it seeks to explain them. As Hrdy (1997, pp. 7–8; italics in the original) notes, ‘‘an evolutionary perspective pushes the search for patriarchy’s origins back . . . by millions of years by asking an additional question: Why should males seek to control females?’’ That is, why patriarchy in the first place? Accordingly, it less superficially identifies sexual selection ‘‘rather than male desire for power as the engine driving the system’’ of patriarchy.

To understand patriarchal phenomena and have more than a wishful chance of bringing effective cultural forces to bear on them, one must

begin by answering Hrdy’s question. In the process, a very unpleasant irony will be uncovered. The dynamics that produced patriarchy include female complicity with domineering males. Male dominance has been achieved at least in part because of female preference (female choice) for dominant males. Indeed, males dominate females by dominating other males with female help. Thus, the pickle that many people find so distasteful ‘‘turns out to have been seasoned with only a sprinkle of culture at best, although once culture arose it made it even more tartish. It is also true that our female ancestors had a hand in the preparation’’ (Lopreato and Crippen 1999). Moreover, women throughout the world continue to support patriarchy through their persistent tendency to favor dominant males.

CONCLUSION

In order to advance, would-be sciences need to discover the value of a number of time-tested techniques. These techniques include especially the use of remote concepts and logical ways to operationalize them, the nomothetic derivation and testing of hypotheses, and the logical structuring of the hypotheses in a body of systematic, cumulative knowledge that facilitates further research and discovery. The history of science strongly suggests that to accomplish even these minimal feats, it is necessary to either discover one general principle or to borrow it in full or modified form from a cognate and more advanced science. At the start of the third millennium there is still no general principle in sociology, general in the sense that it would contain the logic for a large number of derivative statements linking discovery and explanation across the institutional framework. The fitness principle and the theoretical tools surrounding it constitute an invitation from sociology’s most proximate natural science to embrace the fact that the human brain represents a tenacious link to a past that in part is still present. The potential payoff is likely to be far greater than even the most sanguine evolutionists can imagine. It may suffice to consider that just as Newtonian laws eliminated the old prejudice of geocentrism, thus freeing the mind to behold previously inconceivable wonders of nature, sociobiology offers a human perspective from a distance, thus freeing the mind from the still-oppressive assumptions of

anthropocentrism and temporecentrism, benighting corollaries of geocentrism.

According to many critics of sociobiology, since certain behaviors are ‘‘natural,’’ they are not subject to cultural intervention. This is an error that sociobiologists do not commit. Because they are evolutionists, their theorizing is subject to a systemic perspective: ‘‘Phenotype’’ (any feature of anatomy, physiology, or behavior) is a result of the interaction between genotype and environment, including culture. It is essential to have knowledge of both. To change the world, as many scholars are inclined to do, with knowledge (always imperfect) of one to the exclusion of the other is not only obscurantism; it is poor, perhaps dangerous, engineering as well.

REFERENCES

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Clignet, R. 1992 Death, Deeds, and Descendants. New

York: Aldine.

Crippen, T. 1994 ‘‘Toward a Neo-Darwinian Sociology: Its Nomological Principles and Some Illustrative Applications.’’ Sociological Perspectives 37:309–335.

Daly, M., and M. Wilson 1988 Homicide. New York: Aldine.

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——— 1871 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Appleton.

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Huxley, J. 1942 Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. New

York: Harper.

Kimura, D. 1992 ‘‘Sex Differences in the Brain.’’ Scientific American 268:119–125.

Laumann, E., R. Michael, S. Michaels, and J. Gagnon 1994 The Social Organization of Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lenski, G., and J. Lenski 1987 Human Societies. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lerner, G. 1986 The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Kinship. Boston: Beacon.

Lopreato, J. 1984 Human Nature and Biocultural Evolution. London: Unwin Hyman.

———1989 ‘‘The Maximization Principle: A Cause in Search of Conditions.’’ In R. W. Bell and N. J. Bell, eds., Sociobiology and the Social Sciences. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press.

———1992 ‘‘Sociobiology.’’ In E. F. Borgatta, ed.,

Encyclopedia of Sociology. New York: Macmillan.

———, and T. Crippen 1999 Crisis in Sociology: The Need for Darwin. Rutgers, N.J.: Transaction.

Lorber, J. 1994 The Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Mauss, M. (1925) 1954 The Gift. London: Cohen and West.

Maryanski, A. R. 1998 ‘‘Evolutionary Sociology.’’ Advances in Human Ecology 7:1–56.

———, and J. H. Turner 1998 ‘‘New Evolutionary Theories.’’ In J. H. Turner, ed., The Structure of Sociological Theory, 6th ed. New York: Wadsworth.

Mayr, E. 1972 ‘‘Sectual Selection and Natural Selection.’’ In B. G. Campbell, ed., Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man. Chicago: Aldine.

Pareto, V. (1916) 1963 A Treatise on General Sociology. New York: Dover.

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Sumner, W. G. 1906 Folkways. New York: Ginn.

Trivers, R. L. 1971 ‘‘The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.’’ Quarterly Review of Biology 46:35–47.

——— 1972 ‘‘Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.’’ In B. H. Campbell, ed., Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871–1971. Chicago: Aldine.

van den Berghe, P. L. 1981 The Ethnic Phenomenon. New York: Elsevier.

Verbrugge, L. M. 1989 ‘‘The Twain Meet: Empirical Explanations of Sex Differences in Health and Mortality.’’ Journal of Health and Social Behavior 30:282–304.

Wilson, E. O. 1975 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

JOSEPH LOPREATO

SOCIOCULTURAL

ANTHROPOLOGY

In the United States, anthropology usually is considered to consist of four subdisciplines, or ‘‘subfields’’: archaeology (describing and understanding past human behavior by examining material remains), physical or biological anthropology (describing the evolution and modern physical variation of the human species), anthropological linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. Most university departments of anthropology have faculty in three or four of these subdisciplines. Sociocultural anthropology often is called simply cultural anthropology in the United States, although a few academic programs use the term ‘‘social anthropology,’’ the common designation in Europe. Some anthropologists identify applied anthropology as a fifth subfield, while others consider it part of sociocultural anthropology.

Anthropology is defined as the study of human commonalities and differences and expressly includes the entire temporal and geographic range of humankind in its scope. The database of the discipline is large, including prehistoric populations as well as every variety of contemporary society. In distinguishing itself from other social sciences, anthropology emphasizes the holistic, comparative, culture-centered, and fieldwork-de- pendent nature of the discipline.

In Europe, social anthropology is more closely allied with economics, history, and political philosophy than it is with physical anthropology and archaeology, which often are taught in separate programs. As social anthropology evolved in Europe, it came to be associated with studies of the economy, ecology, polity, kinship patterns, and social organization of non-Western peoples, particularly in colonial Africa and Asia. The European approach to theory was associated with sociological (especially functionalist) and, more recently, historical approaches. In the United States, where research focused initially on Native Americans and was strongly influenced by the particularistic descriptive approach of Franz Boas’s ethnogra-

phy, anthropology came to be associated with culture, that ‘‘complex whole’’ (in Edward Tylor’s words) encompassing customs, language, material culture, social order, philosophy, arts, and so on. European social anthropologists have not failed to address culture and Americans have not neglected social structure, yet the difference in terminology distinguishes an emphasis on social relations from an emphasis on shared meaning and behavior.

The heart of sociocultural anthropology is ethnography, the written description of a culture group. Ethnography has undergone many changes since it began with field reports by missionaries and colonial officials. The pace of change has increased since the 1960s, as recognition of global links has become standard, other social scientists have adopted ethnographic methods, and postmodernism has imposed stricter self-reflective criteria on writers. The methodological partner of ethnography is ethnology, the comparative study of societies. In its first decades, anthropology established the ideal that a complete ethnographic record of the world’s cultures would allow comparative studies that would lead to generalizations about the evolution and functioning of all societies. Cross-cultural studies continue to be one of the distinctive contributions of anthropology to the social sciences.

HISTORY

Anthropology and sociology share common origins in the nineteenth-century European search for a science of society. Sociocultural anthropology and sociology also share a theoretical history in the ongoing struggle between the desire for a generalizing, rule-seeking science and that for a humanistic reflection of particular lives. Throughout the twentieth century, academic specialization and differences in research topics, geographic focus, and methodological emphasis separated the two disciplines. In the last several decades, globalization has fostered a partial reconvergence of methods and subjects, though not of worldviews, ethos, or academic bureaucracies.

Sociocultural anthropology often is contrasted with sociology: It is said that anthropologists study small-scale societies, assume that those societies are self-sufficient, and are usually outsiders (politically, ethnically, and economically) to the groups they study. These generalizations are partly true.

The methods of sociocultural anthropology have emphasized the usefulness of seeking ‘‘the large in the small’’ by becoming intimately acquainted with a single band, village, tribe, island, or neighborhood, and anthropology’s early link to colonialism and its base of support in Europe, Japan, China, and the United States has privileged wealthy outsiders as observers of peasants, tribal peoples, and marginalized groups. However, anthropology has always kept the larger picture in mind, and for every study of an ‘‘isolated’’ population, there are ethnographies that reveal links at the regional, national, and global levels. The affiliation of sociocultural anthropology with archaeology and paleoanthropology ensures that the long term and the large scale are never far from sight. Ethnographies of industrialized societies, ranging from ethnic minorities to corporate cultures, begin with the microcosm but connect to larger questions. Sociology has been associated from its beginnings with studies of modernization and globalization in Western societies. In the postwar world, anthropologists became of necessity students of these processes in the same small communities that had been their prewar subjects of study. Anthropologists have sought ways to encompass urban life, regional processes, and global economic and political transformations in their work, leading them to develop skills in quantitative social research as well as their traditional qualitative methods.

Developments in method and theory in the twentieth century have led to a widely perceived split between sociocultural anthropologists who seek a ‘‘natural science of society’’ and those who emphasize anthropology’s humanistic role as an interpreter of cultural worlds. These differences are reflected in the distinction between ‘‘emic’’ and ‘‘etic’’ strategies. Based on the linguistic concept of the phoneme, emic work calls for the researcher to understand the ‘‘inside’’ view, focus on meaning and interpretation, and ‘‘grasp the native’s point of view . . . to realize his vision of his world,’’ in Bronislaw Malinowski’s words. A good ethnography enables readers to understand the motives, meanings, and emotions of a different cultural world. The etic (from ‘‘phonetic’’) approach seeks generalizations beyond the internal cultural worlds of actors, applying social science concepts to the particulars of a culture and often using cross-cultural comparisons to test hypotheses. A good ethnography presents data that can be

compared with other cases. In recent years, the writing of ethnography has self-consciously struggled to develop a style that can evoke the sensibility of a culture while including descriptive information in a format that allows cross-cultural comparisons.

Sociocultural anthropology begins with description and usually intends that description (ethnography) to be a prelude to cross-cultural comparison that will lead to generalizations about types of societies or even about human universals. At the same time, anthropologists are as likely as other social scientists to be influenced by fashions in theory.

THEORY

The nineteenth-century origins of anthropology, like those of sociology, are rooted in the expanding inquiry into the nature of human society that characterizes the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but anthropology’s roots also involve the questions of biological and social evolutionism characteristic of the era, as epitomized in the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Anthropology and sociology share origins in the foundational work of Durkheim, Weber, and Marx. However, cultural anthropology adds to its pantheon of ancestors Tylor, Morgan, and Frazer; it is in the work of these three men that one can see how anthropology was set on a different trajectory. The American Lewis Henry Morgan (Ancient Society, 1877) and the British Edward Burnett Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871) and James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890) are counted among the founders of anthropology because they sought to establish general laws of human society through the comparative study of historical and contemporary peoples. Tylor, Morgan, and Frazer were unilineal evolutionists who believed that universal stages of evolution could be identified in the transition from simple to complex societies and that modern peoples could be ranked in this evolutionary scale. These two strands—the belief that comparison can produce scientific generalizations and the search for evolutionary processes—continue to characterize anthropology, though the racist evolutionism of these early approaches was discarded as anthropology was established as a discipline in the 1920s and 1930s.

While the work of the nineteenth-century social theorists presaged both anthropology and sociology, by the turn of the century, each field was established in separate academic departments and increasingly distinct research programs. In the United States, anthropology as a scholarly project emerged through the work of scholars drawn to the task of reconstructing Native American cultures and languages, especially under the auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the formative political, administrative, and scientific work of Franz Boas. Boas responded to the prevailing ideas of unilineal evolutionism with a theory that came to be called historical particularism, rejecting broad generalizations about stages of evolution in favor of detailed studies of the environmental context and historical development of particular societies. Boas also trained the first generation of professional anthropologists in the United States, and his students, such as Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert Lowie, and Edward Sapir, pioneered new theories that could replace unilineal evolutionism. Sapir’s and Benjamin Whorf’s work on links between language and culture, Margaret Mead’s on enculturation and psychological anthropology, Ruth Benedict’s on ethos, Zora Neale Hurston’s on folklore, and Kroeber’s on the superorganic all fostered decades of theoretical development that pushed American anthropology in distinctive directions. Field studies with Native Americans and other North American minorities honed the skills of the first generations of American anthropologists in linguistic work, informant interviews, life histories, and historical reconstruction and established the holistic style of American anthropology, integrating archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology with the study of society and culture.

While Boas’s students filled library shelves with detailed and impressive ethnographies, a new theoretical orientation developed in Great Britain that would have a great impact on the culturecentered world of American anthropology. This was functionalism, and its key proponents in anthropology were Bronislaw Malinowski (psychological functionalism) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (structural functionalism). The period of interest in the ways in which cultural institutions maintain social order—which affected the United States when Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski spent time at American departments of anthropology in the

1930s—marks the point at which most texts officially distinguish British social anthropology from American cultural anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown countered Boasian particularism with an emphasis on the search for general laws of society and stimulated a generation of European and American students to do the same. British social anthropologists turned their analytic focus on the study of persons and relations in persisting social structures and pushed themselves and their students to develop the close observation, incisive analysis, and careful record keeping that marked the coming of age of long-term participant observation as a research method. Functionalist studies took place in the context of colonialism, with the limitations and power imbalance that that implies, yet remain impressive for the quality of detail and their capacity to integrate descriptions of political, economic, and kinship relations. Many ethnographic classics were produced by British social anthropologists of that era (e.g., Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922 and Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande in 1937 and The Nuer, 1940) and their students, including Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, Audrey Richards, Lucy Mair, Edmund Leach, Max Gluckman, and Fred Eggan.

While American anthropologists added the study of social structure and function to their repertoire, they did not abandon their interest in historical developments, language, personality, and ethos and retained a ‘‘four-fields’’ orientation in the training of graduate students. While some social anthropologists found the idea of culture impossibly vague, American anthropologists reveled in the complexity of the concept, with Kroeber and Kluckhohn assembling a compendium of more than 150 definitions of ‘‘culture.’’ Stimulated by the challenge of British social anthropology, the work of Kroeber, Mead, Benedict, and Sapir from the 1920s through the 1950s explored culture as a distinct level of analysis and a way to grasp the distinctive ethos and worldview of each culture, along with the active role of the individual’s acts and words in shaping a culture.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the influence of materialist approaches in the social sciences, while limited by the anticommunism in American public life (explicitly Marxist approaches did not appear until the 1970s), was manifested in a new set of evolutionary and generalizing approaches in Ameri-

can anthropology. The work of Julian Steward and Leslie White laid the groundwork for a new approach to studies of adaptation and cultural change. White argued for an evolutionary scheme in which culture (the uniquely human capacity to manipulate symbols), as the superorganic human adaptive mechanism, develops through evolutionary stages marked by the increasing ability of human groups to capture energy through technological systems. Steward worked on a smaller scale, arguing for the analysis of structural similarities among cultures at a regional level, which can be understood by recognizing the hierarchical relations among three ‘‘levels of sociocultural integration’’: technoeconomics (infrastructure), sociopolitical organization, and ideology (superstructure). Steward’s scheme allowed anthropologists to catalogue cultures as structural types and encouraged the study of change over time in a ‘‘multilineal evolutionary’’ process that he contrasted with White’s more abstract global stages.

Materialist studies continued to develop and to shape archaeology as well as cultural anthropology. Marshall Sahlins and Elman R. Service merged White’s and Steward’s approaches in a neoevolutionist theory that encouraged both archaeologists and materialist-oriented sociocultural anthropologists to consider the regional and large-scale classification and development of societies. Marvin Harris, Eleanor Burke Leacock, and Morton Fried attempted to explain cultural diversity and change in the context of the causal primacy of production and reproduction. In the 1960s and 1970s, the new field of cultural ecology developed a ‘‘neofunctionalist’’ approach that allowed scientists to include cultural and social aspects of human behavior in natural science research. Roy Rappaport’s 1967 Pigs for the Ancestors began with an effort to measure the energy intake and outflow of a highland new Guinea population; the 1984 edition included a lengthy discussion of criticisms of neofunctionalist theory and the applicability of adaptive and evolutionary concepts to human groups.

In France, Claude Levi-Strauss was developing ideas that would transform the world of social science through structuralism, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a totalizing theory aiming at uncovering the common structures of the human mind. Structuralism, which was influenced by the linguistics theories of Saussure and Jakobson, treated the products of culture as symbolic sys-

tems and examined the formal patterns of those systems in order to envision discern universal structures and cognitive patterns of the human mind. Structuralism was applied to myths, kinship, relations to art, and every other aspect of culture. The work of Levi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, and other structuralists drew sharp rebuttals from theorists who sought explanations of human diversity in material and social conditions rather than in mental templates. Although the abstractness of structuralism eventually limited its interest to students of culture, it continues to be a useful technique, particularly in the analysis of the symbolic products of culture.

Ethnoscience, which emerged in the 1950s, also examined the mental categories underlying cultural products. Drawing heavily on linguistic theory and methodology, ethnoscience tried to develop fieldwork methods sufficiently rigorous to delineate the mental models that generate words and behavior and, in its emphasis on the emic approach, insisted on the necessity of fully accessing the native understanding of cultural domains. As ethnoscience faded in importance in the 1970s, it was succeeded by cognitive anthropology, the cross-cultural study of cognition.

Structuralism, ethnoscience, and responses to materialist neoevolutionist theory stimulated the emergence of symbolic anthropology and cultural analysis in the 1960s and 1970s, and this in turn led to the ‘‘interpretive turn’’ that has continued in cultural anthropology through the rest of the century. Again, linguistics proved influential, as David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner explored new ways to study the cultural construction of meaning and the public representation of meaning in cultural elements. Most symbolic anthropologists focus on the description and interpretation of particular cultural cases, emphasizing the ethnographer’s role in explicating cultural events or products, though a few symbolic anthropologists, such as Mary Douglas, have sought general models of symbol systems. Symbolic anthropology shifted in the 1980s toward interpretive anthropology, which in turn generated a decade of reflection on the writing of ethnography, seeking modes of representation that would represent the worldview, internal logic, and emotional sensibility of a culture. Emerging from interpretive approaches have been experiments in ethnography, renewed interest in life histories, and extensive

critiques of an etic-oriented ethnography that relies on the authoritative voice of an ‘‘outside’’ observer and author. The 1980s also saw a new interest in history, spurred in part by the work of French scholars such as Braudel, Bourdieu, and Foucault and also playing a part in drawing some sociocultural anthropologists toward humanistic approaches.

American cultural anthropology has always taken an interest in evolutionary questions, and in the 1970s, the biologist E. O. Wilson used sociobiology to challenge social scientists to study the role of natural selection in human behavior. Anthropologists’ immediate response was to criticize sociobiology as sociologically naive, culture-bound, and potentially racist and sexist. In the longer term, however, this challenge renewed anthropologists’ interest in the holistic approach to culture, stimulating new approaches to the flexible and complex linkage of genetic inheritance and cultural malleability. Archaeologists, physical anthropologists, and cultural anthropologists share an interest in these longterm questions, which now are studied as ‘‘human behavioral ecology.’’

ORGANIZATION

While anthropological theory has participated in many of the trends in the social sciences in this century, anthropologists most often speak of themselves in terms of the topics they study and the geographic areas in which they are expert. A cultural anthropologist might say that she studies ‘‘gender issues in the Middle East,’’ ‘‘political hierarchy in Polynesia,’’ or ‘‘hunter-gatherer ecology in the Arctic,’’ with the implication that her theoretical school is a less useful category or that one might include several different theoretical or methodological approaches to one’s topic.

A review of textbooks in anthropology and courses offered in larger departments provides an indication of the overlap and the difference in range between sociological and anthropological topics. Traditional topics in anthropology include the categories of sociopolitical life (political anthropology, the anthropology of religion, social organization, patterns of subsistence, economic anthropology), cross-cultural approaches to all social science topics (ethnicity and identity, psychological anthropology, urban anthropology, ethnohistory, gender), theoretical approaches (sym-

bolic anthropology, cultural ecology), applied topics (legal anthropology, developmental anthropology, culture change, medical anthropology, education and culture), and topics reflecting the persistent holism of the anthropological enterprise (language and culture, genetics and behavior).

Anthropologists’ regional focus traditionally has been small-scale non-Western societies, but this has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. While sociologists and other social scientists have become more active in non-Western contexts (particularly economic development and modernization), anthropologists have become more active in studying Western societies, using their traditional skills of small-community ethnography, cultural models, and comparison in these situations. However, as part of their postgraduate training, most American and European anthropologists do a lengthy period of participant observation research in a small-scale society, usually a foraging band or a tribal or peasant society.

One stimulus to anthropologists’ willingness to become wholeheartedly involved in the study of Western, industrialized, and mass societies has been the growth in applied work. While sociology was committed to researching public policy issues from its beginning, anthropology has only intermittently taken on research directed at social problems and policy issues. Beginning with government work during World War II and the postwar Fox and Vicos projects in applied anthropology and as a result of globalization and limited academic job opportunities for anthropologists, there has been an increase in putting anthropological concepts and methods to the service of immediate outcomes rather than academic research. The greatest demand for applied anthropology is in economic and social development, medical anthropology, the anthropology of education, and international business.

METHODS

Anthropology was born in the theories of ‘‘armchair anthropologists’’ who based their theories about the evolution of human beliefs and societies on the reports of colonial officials, missionaries, and merchants. Since that time, the commitment of researchers such as Boas, Mead, and Malinowski to detailed, long-term field studies has generated

the impulse that has sustained generations of anthropologists in an effort to produce detailed, fine-grained, firsthand descriptions of the world’s cultures. Cultural anthropology has long held that long-term participant observation, including mastery of local languages, is the best way to produce valid ethnographic description. Participant observation is the source of anthropology’s ethnographic database and the foundation on which controlled cross-cultural comparison is built.

The work of field research and the writing of ethnography have received much attention in recent decades. Participant observation is now an umbrella term for a research project that, while it extends over the long term (usually at least a year) and relies on the use of the local language, key informants, and living ‘‘close to the ground’’ with the people being studied, is likely to include a range of additional research techniques. Sociocultural anthropologists also are trained in kinship analysis, unstructured and structured interviews, questionnaires, scales, taxonomies, and direct and unobtrusive observation. In the past decade, there has been a growing expectation that researchers will combine qualitative and quantitative research methods, increasing both the validity and the reliability of ethnographic work. Applied anthropology has generated its own methods, some of them shaped by the time and cash restraints of nonacademic research, such as rapid rural assessment, participatory appraisal, and decision-tree modeling.

Cross-cultural comparison has been a goal of anthropology from the start. The first armchair anthropologists used sometimes unreliable secondhand information to generate categories and stages of social evolution, but researchers soon employed more scientific methods. Archaeologists’ work on regional and chronological linkages encouraged ethnologists to trace the development, distribution, and diffusion of culture traits (especially in the United States, with Boas’s encouragement). British social anthropologists and the neoevolutionists urged the use of regional and global comparisons to generate models of structural stability and change. George P. Murdock greatly facilitated large-scale comparison when he created the Human Relations Area Files, the physical form of the great database of human cultures anthropology had long sought. Cross-cultural studies in anthropology have allowed anthropologists to generate and test midlevel hypotheses about

cultural patterns and allowed social scientists to test the broader validity of hypotheses generated in Western contexts.

CURRENT ISSUES

In surveying the history of anthropological theory, one often notices the persistent tension between materialist and idealist ways of studying culture. In the current environment, after a decade of postmodern critiques, this tension has actually split a few academic departments, severing archaeology and biological anthropology from cultural anthropology, or ‘‘scientific’’ from ‘‘humanistic’’ approaches. Research specialization and job-mar- ket pressures also interfere with the holistic fourfields approach that American anthropologists have long considered their hallmark. In addition, sociocultural anthropology has been pressed by the inroads of literary criticism, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and other related fields into its traditional preserve. Like other social sciences, anthropology feels that it is living through a ‘‘crisis’’ that represents both a point in a repeated cycle of theoretical change and a response to national and global contexts.

However, the end of the twentieth century has seen a wider range of research and applied work than had ever been done previously (see recent issues of American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, and Human Organization). Current work in anthropology includes traditional detailed ethnographies that aim to increase the descriptive database of the world’s cultures, problem-focused fieldwork aimed at elucidating theoretical puzzles, reflexive ethnography that attempts to find a moral and artistic center from which to write, analyses of organizations and evaluations of programs intended to guide policy decisions, and hypothesis-testing data crunching. The long-standing distinction between materialist and idealist approaches continues as interpretive, postmodern anthropology seeks new ways to do the job it has been critiquing for a decade and as ecological, evolutionist, and materialist approaches argue with renewed vigor for a scientific discipline.

Sociocultural anthropology and sociology share modern interests in agency; power; the relative role of social structures and individual action in culture change; the intersections of ethnicity, class,

and gender; and the historical shaping of modern institutions and cultural representations. In all its interests, ongoing input from archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistics has given sociocultural anthropology a uniquely broad and deep perspective on the human condition, and its stream of theory is fed from these other sources of knowledge about the human condition. In describing the commonalities that unite cultural anthropology, Rob Borofsky speaks of anthropologists’ shared ethics: a desire to publicize ‘‘human commonalities’’ (especially in countering racism), the valuing of cultural diversity, and the use of cultural differences ‘‘as a form of cultural critique’’ of the anthropologist’s home culture and in general of industrial mass society. Despite an explosion of variation in what sociocultural anthropologists do, anthropologists’ holistic and comparative worldview remains distinctive.

REFERENCES

Bernard, H. Russell 1994 Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Borofsky, Robert, ed. 1994 Assessing Cultural Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Harris, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Crowell.

Hatch, Elvin 1973 Theories of Man and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kaplan, David, and Robert A. Manners 1972 Culture Theory. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press.

Kuper, Adam 1983 Anthropology and Anthropologists: The

Modern British School. London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul.

Kuznar, Lawrence 1997 Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press.

Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer 1986

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McGee, R. Jon, and Richard L. Warms 2000 Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. 2nd ed. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield.

Moore, Jerry D. 1997 Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press.

LIN POYER

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

When Brown and Gilman published their classic work on pronouns of power and solidarity (1960; see also 1989), no one characterized that paper as a major contribution to ‘‘sociolinguistics.’’ When Gumperz and Hymes published their updated

Directions in Sociolinguistics in 1986 (the 1972 edition was based on a 1966 publication of the American Anthropological Association), they were providing a paradigmatic definition of recognizable enterprise; that book included contributions by many of the founders. A two-part survey of sociolinguistics written in 1973 (Grimshaw 1973b, 1974a) noted that more had been published on sociolinguistic topics in the early 1970s than in all previous years. That review commented on about fifty new titles; only a few sociologists (particularly Basil Bernstein and Joshua Fishman, each with several volumes) were represented. In the three decades since that time, interest in language in use (micro sociolinguistics) has continued to grow exponentially; while that interest still is not seen as part of mainstream sociology, it is moving in that direction (Lemert 1979). Interest in more macro dimensions of the sociology of language—for instance, language conflict, language maintenance, and language spread and decline—also has grown, though much more slowly.

SOME ACTIVITIES AND SOME LABELS

At least a dozen specialties investigate some aspect of language: its origins, structure, invariant and variant features, acquisition, use in social contexts, change, spread, and death, and so on. Among those specialties, there are at least five whose practitioners do not consider themselves sociolinguists or sociologists of language and whose research seldom is incorporated directly into sociolinguistics/sociology of language (SL/SOL) investigations:

1.Formal linguistics that focuses on languages as autonomous systems and investigates how those systems work independently of human and/or social agency. This activity often is referred to as ‘‘autonomous linguistics’’ and occasionally as ‘‘nonhyphenated linguistics.’’

2.Anthropological linguistics devoted to a ‘‘description’’ (writing of grammars and