Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

As the new century unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that contexts in which anthropology is practised as an established discipline, scholarly enterprise, applied endeavour, profession and intellectual pursuit keep changing, altering and transforming. The general aim in putting together this collection of essays was to test the state and condition of the relationship between anthropology and society in a number of countries where anthropological discourses and ethnographic activity have had a tangible presence in academia and beyond. Adopting a comparative approach – anthropology’s long-term companion – that we hoped would once again allow us to highlight where things have developed differently and where they seemed the same (or indeed were only equally illusorily), we asked leading practitioners from Austria, Brazil, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa and the United States to ponder the same, rather broadly posed, set of questions.

• What is the status of anthropology in Britain? • What does the general non-academic public know about anthropology? • What is the ‘stereotype’ of the anthropologist? • Does anthropological knowledge travel beyond academia to broader publics? • What is the status of anthropology within the University?

In response to the fine initiative by Alexei Elfimov, the present essay discusses the status of socio-cultural anthropology in the German-speaking countries in shifting contexts of past and present. I will focus here on three main themes, namely, socio-cultural anthropology as seen by a wider non-academic public, its status and terminology within wider academic contexts, and the internal differentiations among anthropologists in the German language zone with their unequal access to the public.

For me, since the 1980s, the distinctive event in the recent history of social and cultural anthropology in the United States has been a profound cutting of the discipline (or rather of this influential component of the four-field disciplinary organisation of general anthropology) from moorings that defined it through much of the twentieth century. Certainly the discipline is still wedded functionally to certain aspects of the institutional model which has shaped the identity of social and cultural anthropologists, as pioneered through the works of such figures as Bronislaw Malinowski in England and Franz Boas in the United States. Most anthropologists still begin their careers with a geographical area specialisation outside the U.S. However, few receive the intensive areas studies education that was available and encouraged in the U.S. during the 1950s through to the 1970s when, in the atmosphere of the Cold War and development studies, there was a huge investment in such interdisciplinary programmes that has since waned.

What follows is the personal view of someone who has been conducting indigenous studies since the 1960s, and has, therefore, her own understanding of the field. My reading of ethnological production in Brazil will probably differ from that of my Brazilian colleagues, and will certainly be different from that of foreign ethnologists. However, being totally immersed in the ethnological community of the country, I could never pretend to pose as an impartial observer.

An honest statement to begin with would be that the place of anthropology in Russian society is something of a relativity puzzle. Some can define its place but are not sure what exactly anthropology is. Others can define what anthropology is but are not quite sure what place it occupies. A few suppose they know both. The majority are not aware that either exists.

The issue is a complex one, and I do not have a handy equation to reduce it to a single meaningful set of answers, but I will try to delineate some of the facets that shape its general contours.

What is anthropology in France about, what is its image, its impact? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Finding answers to these questions would require a whole book. However, in a more modest way, I would like to make a number of observations related to the recent history of the discipline – history that, as we shall see, is inseparable from the general socio-political context and the place that the discipline occupies today in the French intellectual landscape.

Dutch anthropology is a rich field of studies of culture and society in Europe and beyond, with hundreds of participants, today and for the past two centuries.1 It is the result of a complex interaction between scholarly interests in distant peoples, several centuries of colonialism and international trade, and political decisions on the structuring of higher education and research in the Netherlands and its former colonies.2 To a large extent, this historical background has shaped the way research is organised and funded nowadays.

Anthropology began in South Africa with the work of nineteenth century missionaries like Alexandre Junod (Hammond-Tooke 1997; Thornton 1998) and as such it fits nicely into the cliche´ of a ‘colonial’ science. However, even at its humble beginnings in the former British colony, anthropology was much more than that (Thornton 1983; Cocks 2001); it served as an important field where different points of opinion collided or converged, but also as an important laboratory for different political experiments – some of which had lasting and devastating effects on South African societies.