Editor’s introduction

Anthropology and philosophy intertwine like the strands of DNA, twisting and crossing paths with frequency over millennia. At the very dawn of what we consider to be Western philosophy, Socrates, as described by Plato, applies an evolutionary model to understanding political forms. In Book VIII of The Republic, Plato describes a succession of political formations that follow the overthrow of aristocracy leading, penultimately, to democracy and then finally descending into tyranny. I would remark that, from the perspective of 2018, this model seems superior to that developed by 19th-century anthropologists, although a certain resemblance to the brooding conclusion to Morgan’s Ancient Society can be seen.

The first self-proclaimed academic anthropologist was the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who lectured on the topic for 25 years. Although he would have little direct influence on the subsequent professional development of the discipline, certainly his influence on later philosophers, such as Herder and Dilthey, who would in turn help shape anthropology, was great. For most of its history as a separate discipline, anthropology actively eschewed philosophy, even when working on similar problems. There were a few exceptions: Herbert Spencer, who synthesized a philosophy of evolution, influenced the first generation of anthropologists. However, Franz Boas, a colleague and friend of John Dewey, with whom he who co-taught a seminar on comparative ethics at Columbia University, never mentions that connection in his publications, even The Mind of Primitive Man, which covered much the same territory as the seminar presumably did (Harkin 2017). Ruth Benedict was perhaps the only prominent American anthropologist to explicitly draw on philosophical thought, most notably Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Apollonian duality, and gestalt theory. But for the most part anthropologists were eager to identify rather with social science and science writ large, than what was seen by many as a vestigial discipline.

This mutual avoidance began to break down mid-century, in part by the post-war translation of French anthropology and philosophy into English. French anthropology has always been more aware of, and willing to engage with, philosophy. Most important, from the Anglophone perspective, was Claude Lévi-Strauss, a philosophy student as an undergraduate, who throughout his writings engages with the French philosophical tradition (Descartes, Rousseau, Bergson) and with the most prominent school of philosophy of his own day, existentialism. His argument contra Sartre in The Savage Mind reads more like philosophy than anthropology (see Doran 2013).

By the 1960s, change was afoot. References to philosophers—primarily Continental but with some specializations, notably ethnoscience, relying heavily on Analytic philosophy—surged. Alongside the anthropological canon, graduate students began reading philosophers and literary theorists such as Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, and Ricoeur, and, later, the “post-structuralists,” Foucault, Derrida, and so forth. (Interestingly, it was not until the end of the 20th century that a prominent anthropologist pointed out the connection between American anthropology and Pragmatic philosophy; Lewis 2000). In my own education, I read all of this, and also took a seminar at the University of Chicago with Paul Ricoeur. Additionally, I was exposed to phenomenology (which can be viewed as philosophy’s attempt to reconcile with anthropology) through the writing and teaching of anthropologists such as Terence Turner and Nancy Munn.

I am eager to see such rapprochements between the two fields, and so have invited a prominent philosopher to write in these pages. James K. A. Smith has taken on the oeuvre of an anthropologist who engages most prominently with the philosophical tradition: Michael Jackson.

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The collection of oral literature in various forms and genres (Boas distinguished between “tales” and “texts,” for example) was an early objective of anthropology in North America and beyond. This made eminent sense, given the assumptions and practices of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was seen as simply another sort of “collecting,” along with artworks, artifacts, and human remains, which would preserve a record of disappearing cultures. And, to a certain extent, that was true. Many of the cultures of Amazonia about which Lévi-Strauss wrote through the interpretation of texts, had disappeared by the time he wrote about them. And yet many cultures did survive; some intact, others radically changed through the intervention of national governments and Christian missionaries.

It is this latter subset of indigenous cultures, which represents the majority both geographically and demographically, that is of particular theoretical and pragmatic interest. Communities such as the ones in which I worked in British Columbia fell solidly into this category, with considerable acculturation and language loss, due primarily to the residential school system, mitigated by an intense desire to preserve and revive traditional, language, knowledge, and practices. This produced some paradoxes: outsiders must be brought in to record narratives, analyze the language, and produce language-learning materials. In some cases, knowledge that was never intended for more than a few people in a particular family or clan was published for anyone to read. And yet the collected tales of Boas and his successors has proved essential to the reimagining of traditional culture for the modern age, what Aaron Glass has called “indigenous recuperation” (Glass 2018).

Although New Zealand offers a rather different case study legally, politically, and culturally (for instance, Canadian First Nations never signed the equivalent of a Treaty of Waitangi), many of the same dynamics apply there to the collection and publication of linguistic materials and oral traditions. The whakapapa of Maori oral narrative provide an historic record and cultural “backbone,” as Jim Williams calls it, for contemporary Maori. They are essentially public documents, which trace the genealogy and history of tribes and iwis. And yet their meaning will necessarily be different to a cultural outsider than to an insider. Here Williams explores the usual emic–etic dichotomy and proclaims that neither can offer a fully satisfactory perspective. He proposes instead an “etmic” approach, which tacks between the two perspectives. This is certainly something he experiences in his daily life, as a traditional Maori elder and a professor at Otago University.

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Stuart J. Fiedel critiques recent attempts to synthesize the story of the peopling of the Americas from an archaeological perspective. (Obviously, indigenous people have their own stories, as discussed above). He attacks what he sees as the new orthodoxy of the Coastal Migration Hypothesis, proposing instead a return to the older consensus of an inland migration route. He cites two recent discoveries of human remains—the Mal’ta boy and Anzick infant—which genetic analysis shows were related to a specific group living in the Siberian interior. The date of these finds and the genetic sequencing suggest a later (post-17,000 B.P.) settlement date than the proponents of the Pre-Clovis Hypothesis would suggest.

This follows a trend of using genomic analysis to debunk theories based on archaeological evidence alone. The far more controversial Solutrean Hypothesis—which imagines initial colonization of North America from Europe—received a similar treatment recently (Raff 2018). Fiedel argues that it is no longer feasible to posit some vague northeast Asian population or location as the origin of Amerindians, nor to incorrectly suggest a connection with known groups such as the Ainu or Jomon.

While not all contemporary Native Americans will accept any science-based narrative that contradicts oral traditions, many are certainly capable of compartmentalizing different sorts of claims. In any case, given the political implications of migration theories in our parlous time—more so with the Solutrean Hypothesis than with the variants on Beringia to be sure—it is truly an ethical duty for anthropology to produce a synthesis of the best available data from all sources. While absolute consensus will never exist—there will always be outliers given the reward system of academic science—it is important to present as complete a picture of the peopling of the Americas as the data will allow us.