Abstract
From Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences, by Arpad Szakolczai and Bjørn Thomassen, can serve two main purposes. First, it can be used as an original textbook for an undergraduate or even graduate class in social theory, as it reviews the lives and works of classical as well as what the authors call “maverick” nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists and ethnologists. Among these authors, we find French anthropologists from the Durkheimian, or rather, neo-Durkheimian school, like Marcel Mauss of course, but also his former student and quasi-contemporary Arnold van Gennep, or one of Durkheim’s contemporaries, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl; as well as scholars who have worked outside the Durkheimian canon, and in disciplines other than ethnology, like Gabriel Tarde or René Girard. We also find authors trained in the Anglo-American academic context like Colin Turnbull, Paul Radin, Gregory Bateson, and Victor Turner, to cite just a few. For each of these either classical or forgotten figures forming what Szakolczai and Thomassen call the “maverick” tradition in ethnology, they select a few concepts, like that of “rituals” and “liminality” (van Gennep), “mystique” and “participation” (Lévy-Bruhl), “gift-giving” (Mauss), or “trickster” (Radin), around which each chapter after the introduction and before the two concluding chapters are organized.
The chapters generally start with little-known and relevant biographical elements that allow the reader to not only situate the author, but also understand how the key concepts under review were received and used by their contemporaries, either sociologists or ethnologists, and how these concepts have been recycled or simply abandoned afterward as a result of institutional transformations in the academic fields in which these (mostly) men worked—the latter are the object of analysis in the two last chapters. For our colleagues who want to teach a “social theory” class, this book will therefore clearly serve a useful purpose: its list of elegant and erudite intellectual portraits will help bridge the divide between social and anthropological theory, which, as Szakolczai and Thomassen demonstrate, was less meaningful at the time of the founding of ethnology and sociology than it has (unfortunately) become today, especially in the U.S. academic context.
But this book also pursues a second, and higher, ambition, which is to use these authors and their works to criticize what Szakolczai and Thomassen call the “modernocentrism” (p. 18) of contemporary social theory, which consists in privileging the study of contemporary societies (European or not), considered in isolation, never seriously considering that they might present characteristics similar to non-modern ones. For them, the intellectual and methodological contributions of these “maverick” ethnologists has too often been relegated to the dustbin of history (like those of Lévy-Bruhl) because of their “ethnocentrism,” which can be understood in two ways: first, as manifested by their association with the colonial project during the interwar era, as in the case of Mauss, for instance; second, as illustrated by their insistence in building a general science of knowledge practices that, although it included “archaic” or “non-western” forms of knowledge among the legitimate objects of analysis, did not purport to take these non-western forms of knowledge as the basis for a normative and methodological framework.
Szakolczai and Thomassen agree that the ethnologists whose work they review may have been faulty to various degrees for one of these variations of “ethnocentrism,” but for them, this failing is not a reason to forget their lasting contribution, which consists in systematically comparing European and non-European societies and identifying modern and non-modern elements in each context. For instance, long before Pierre Bourdieu, van Gennep compared the role of liminality and differentiation in rituals in French metropolitan and Algerian villages, which made him realize in a manner more subtle than Bourdieu that distinction practices existed in both European and non-European societies and that the boundary between the modern and non-modern elements involved in each set of practices did not squarely overlap with the distinction between European and non-European contexts.
Although Szakolczai and Thomassen do not really engage with Bruno Latour’s argument about “modernity,” they argue that the work of the “maverick” ethnologists made them realize “precisely the problem of the ‘modernocentric’ worldview in which they were trained” and that the solution to such problems lay in “a return to some of the central tenets of the non-modern in European thought” (p. 19). The lasting contribution that such “maverick” ethnologists should thus be remembered for is therefore largely methodological and associated with what I would call their “enlarged comparative perspective.” The latter consists not only in analyzing how the most “modern” scientific forms of knowledge practices operate (as Science and Technology scholars have done for the last 40 years), or how modern forms of knowledge-making are found, for instance, among indigenous communities or other non-western groups who define the relationship between nature and culture differently than do western scientists (as some postmodern or postcolonial scholars interested in the idea of the Anthropocene have recently done). In fact, it lies in building on varied ethnographic studies to develop a general comparative anthropological perspective whose aim is to reveal the presence of the non-modern and modern in all ways of thinking and to delineate how the boundaries of each concept can be drawn in a comparative perspective. For Szakolczai and Thomassen, if the concept of “modernity” can be saved, rather than abandoned or castigated, it has to be emptied of all the normative and ready-made (either positive or negative) associations that it too often carries, to be transformed into the outcome of the comparative effort of theory-building. This is not an easy task, nor a humble research program, but one that can renew the discussion of “reflexive anthropology.”
Although I am not sure that social theorists will be able to directly draw from this book a precise roadmap to a new theory of modernity, the many erudite and thoughtful analyses of key anthropological works found in the book can certainly reorient our thinking on “modernity.” I believe that the book makes a most valuable contribution to the history of sociology and ethnology, participating in a collective effort to show how the “structuralist” turn in anthropology (with Claude Lévi-Strauss as a key figure) simply obscured the reading of both “maverick” and classical ethnologists of the previous era. We can hope the book will encourage social theorists to reopen many of the works reviewed and include them in the syllabi of future social theory classes.