Afarensis

Chad Orzel over at Uncertain Principles has asked about great experiments or papers in various fields. I have been thinking it over for a couple of days now, trying to decide how I wanted to answer the question. Like most other sciences anthropology has spawned a wide variety of subfields. Ask any anthropologist in the US and they will tell you anthropology is composed of four subfields: physical, cultural, archaeology and anthropological linguistics. Each of these has spawned a bunch of others (human variation, osteology, paleoanthropology, human variation, forensic anthropology, zooarchaeology, cultural ecology, etc, etc, etc.). Theoretically, someone who graduates with a BA or Master's should be equally well versed in all of them (with slightly more training in the area they are specializing in. In actual practice some departments tend to focus more on some fields than others (in the department I studied in linguistics and to a much lesser extent cultural were slighted). So when Chad asked about experiments and papers, my brain when tilt for a few days while I tried to figure out which of those subject areas I wanted to cover. An added problem is that a lot of the "classics" in anthropology are actually books and not papers. By classics, I hasten to add, I mean things that changed the way anthropology is practiced.

I'll start with cultural anthroplogy. Cultural anthropology is a perfect example of what I was talking about above. Not because of a massive number of sub-fields but because of a massive number of theoretical orientations

I'll start with cultural anthroplogy. Cultural anthropology is a perfect example of what I was talking about above. Not because of a massive number of sub-fields but because of the massive number of theoretical orientations taht have developed throughout it's history. Just as an example (not necessarily in chronological order) you have early evolutionists such as Lewis Henry Morgan, the structural functionalists such as Radcliffe-Brown, and the functionalists such as Malinowski (Argonauts of the Western Pacific was a pretty important book). Then you have another round of evolutionists (which I will get back to latter) and a group centered around Durkheim (whose Elementary Forms of Religious Life was pretty important), stucturalists such as Levi-Strauss, symbologists such as Turner and of course Geertz with thick description. You also have Boas with historical particularism. Which brings us back to the evolutionists and classics.

Leslie White, The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas is arguably one of the more important papers in cultural anthropology. The man largely responsible for establishing anthropology as an academic discipline was Franz Boas. Most of the anthropologists you are likely to have heard of were Franz Boas' students (Kroeber - Ursula K. Le Guin's dad - , Mead, Benedict, Lowie, Sapir - of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis - to name a few). White's paper pratically demolished Boasian anthropology and had profound effects on how anthropology is practicced.

The second classic is a book. This is Julian Steward's Theory of Culture Change. Prior to Steward most evolutionary theories in cultural anthropology were by and large the Scala Natura translated into cultural terms. Morgan's theory that cultures passed through three stages (savagery, barbarism and civilization) is a good example. Where Morgan thought of evolution in terms of a ladder each culture must climb, Steward looked at evolution as a bush. For Steward each culture had it's own evolutionary trajectory, largely determined by the ecological and cultural environment in which it resided (although the term "niche construction" wasn't around back then I think it would be an accurate description of what Steward had in mind).

The third classic is Reinventing Anthropology by Del Hymes. The book set the stage for the post modernist influence in anthropology. It is a collection of writings by a wide variety of anthropologists that shook up cultural anthropology as then practiced.

The fourth is The Rise of Anthropological Theory by Marvin Harris. It is the closest thing we have to Gould or Thompson (in terms of length). I would recommend it to any one who wants to know what anthropology is about. It is basically a critique of attempts at theory building and a history of cultural anthropology. It was written in the 80's so it is a little out of date.

Turning to archaeology there are a number of classics. They can be divided between method and theory and excavations. I'm going to focus on the method and theory (I may do a post on important excavations in the future)

The true giant of archaeological literaure is A. V. Kidder's An Introduction to Southwestern Archaeology with a Preliminary Account of the Excavations at Pecos. This is the first regional synthesis of an archaeological are ever undertaken. In addition, this is also the first use of stratigraphy in excavating an archaological site. The book also contains one of the first uses of ethnological studies in interpreting archaeological remains. If that is not enough, Kidder creates some of the fundamental methods for analyzing pottery and applying that analysis to understanding the cultural history of the southwest. As an interesting historical aside, it is estimated that Mrs. Kidder washed over a million pot shards at the dig...

Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips' Method and Theory in American Archaeology, Walter Taylor's A Study of Archaeology (most of which was written in a POW camp) and Watson, Leblanc and Redman's Explanation in Archaeology are also extremely important. I should also mention that pretty much anything written by Lewis Binford or Michael Schiffer are classics. Probably should mention Ian Hodder as well.

I'll do the important stuff from Physical anthropology tomorrow.

The next classic is