Abstract
The plight of the literary outputs in anthropology by Indian anthropologists could be aptly summarized in the following lines, “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” These lines are from the poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798).
Although India has been the anthropologist’s paradise owing to her diversity and antiquity in social and cultural realms, there is a great paucity of text and reference books relating to anthropological theories and concepts written by Indian anthropologists. In addition, barring a few exceptions, most of the Indian anthropologists have only tried to replicate Western models in Indian contexts in their studies. Ironically, anthropology is though taught in more than 40 universities in the country at the Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral levels, but the existent theoretical materials in Indian anthropology largely lack contemporary relevance. In the last few decades, anthropology in India seems to have come to a standstill, as there has been little development in methodological approach or literary inputs written by trained Indian anthropologists. At this juncture, the book Anthropological Thought: From Evolutionism to Postmodernism and Beyond by Professor Vijoy S. Sahay could be treated as a landmark volume.
My association with the discipline of anthropology spans over a period of two decades when I joined the Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology in the year 2004. As a student as well as an academician, I always felt short of literary texts and treatises written by Indian anthropologists. Besides, whatever the text materials were available, were mostly ideographic in anthropological parlance instead of being nomothetic. Hence, this volume on “Anthropological Thought” has arrived just in time reviving the nomothetic tradition in Indian anthropology. The author has attempted to comprehensively compile the different methodological trends in the discipline. Written in simple and lucid language, the book is valuable for novices as well as seasoned anthropologists. It is hoped that in the near future, the book Anthropological Thought will be one of the most recommended reference books in anthropology across the country.
The book has been organized into 13 chapters arranged in chronological order. Anthropology as a discipline has emerged over a long span of time gradually, where different methodological approaches have dominated the epistemological paradigms. The book facilitates its readers to a journey through these developments and also helps them to discern the history of the discipline. To illustrate, the Evolutionary School of Thought of the mid-nineteenth century was revived as Neo-Evolutionism with certain modifications during the twentieth century. In the majority of the texts, these schools are discussed together treating their developments as linear. In this volume, the Neo-Evolutionary School has been discussed much after the Evolutionary School. Hence, the readers can easily figure out the trajectories of these schools and major developments even from the index of the book.
The second notable feature of the book is its panoramic overview of the concepts and theories. It is widely known that anthropology as a discipline had quite a youthful beginning with the Evolutionary theory in the mid-nineteenth century, precisely in the works of Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir James Frazer, J. F. McLennan, and so on. However, the seeds of Western anthropological thoughts were already sown in the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers and stoics—dating back to the sixth-century bc. In this backdrop, the author has tried to present the detailed trajectory of the origin of the major theoretical concepts, tracing its genesis much before the birth of the actual concept. To illustrate, the concept of the “National Culture” or the “Study of the Culture at a Distance,” which became a very popular area of research during the Second World War, is associated with the Psychological School of Anthropology of the twentieth century. However, the seeds of the concepts in rudimentary forms could be found in the writings of some pre-Freudian scholars, such as John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume (1711–1776), Imanual Kant (1724–1804), and Jacob Burckhardt (1711–1897). In addition, the author has presented exhaustive details of each author, their biographies, and significant contributions substantiated by appropriate quotes and references.
Another distinguishing feature of this book is its nomothetic style of writing. The author has discussed all the anthropological theories and concepts but with great analytical rigor. He has tried to quote the original texts and references, which lend credibility to the analysis. Instead of the plain narratives as propounded by the original scholars, the author has presented the critical scrutiny of the ideas, supplemented by quotes from other scholars too, to present a holistic view of the concept, which is also one of the hallmarks of the discipline.
Besides, the detailed analysis of the theories and concepts, such as Evolutionism, Diffusionism, Historical Particularism, Functionalism, Structure Functionalism, Structuralism, Culture and Personality, and Neo-Evolutionism, the book also contains the more recent developments in the discipline, such as New Ethnography, Cognitive Anthropology, Symbolic Anthropology, Historical Materialism, Dialectical Materialism, Cultural Materialism, and Human Materialism. The author also highlights the gap areas warranting further research. For example, the author is convinced that the seeds of the Culture and Personality School of Thought were laid by the Buddha even before the advent of the Greek thinkers and philosophers. Hence, the manuscript comes in handy for all the scholars and academicians interested in the recent trends in anthropology.
Though the book Anthropological Thought is one of the best scholarly outputs written by a trained Indian anthropologist for the students of anthropology in recent times, nonetheless, the book could have been further improved along the following lines.
Apparently, the second half of the book seems to have been written in a haste and hurried manner. The first half of the text is exhaustive and systematic, but the second half appears to be a little synoptic and brief. Similarly, the contributions of the anthropologists interested in the rural or peasant cultures loosely, referred to as the stalwarts of the Civilizational School or the Chicago School of Anthropology, are surprisingly absent. The theories and concepts of the Civilizational School were significant, not only in the growth of anthropology in general but also in the growth of Indian anthropology in particular. The majority of the Indian scholars and their anthropological contributions owe to the Chicago School of Anthropology. In this regard, I would suggest, if the author brings out a detailed volume in future on the contributions of Indian anthropologists and recent developments in India, it will be a very welcome endeavor by him. The book concludes on an introspective note in the Postscript, where the author briefly evaluates the theoretical and conceptual contributions made by some Indian anthropologists.
Last, but not least, in the concluding part of the Postscript, the author gives a clarion call to fellow anthropologists that it is high time to break the shackles of colonial or postcolonial anthropology. In the opinion of the author, India happens to be the best laboratory in the world for all the branches of anthropological research; of course, because of its “diversity” and “antiquity.”