ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Edited by Alan Barnard Jonathan Spencer London & New York First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 First published in paperback 1998 This edition first published 2002 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 1996, 1998, 2002 Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-45803-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-25684-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-28558-5 (Print Edition) To the memory of Julia Swannell (1952–92) Editorial board Maurice Bloch Ralph Grillo Signe Howell Marshall Sahlins Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction vii How to use this book x List of entries xi List of contributors xvii Analytical table of contents xxvii Contributions by author xxxiii 1 Entries Biographical appendix 852 Glossary 890 Name index 937 People and places index 975 Subject index 988 Acknowledgements Many people have helped the editors to bring this volume to completion. The project itself was first suggested by Mark Barragry of Routledge and, at different times, we have been ably supported by Michelle Darraugh, Robert Potts and Samantha Parkinson of the Routledge Reference Section. Friends and colleagues too numerous to mention have withstood our many casual requests for advice and support, not to mention contributions—some of which have been provided under heroic pressures of time and space. Our editorial board has also been a source of sound advice and ideas. The Department of Social Anthropology in Edinburgh has provided space, calm and, in the final stages of the work, a smoking laser-printer. At different times we have been helped there by Francis Watkins, Colin Millard, Sandra Brown and especially Joni Wilson—all past or present PhD students in the department. Colin Millard and Robert Gibb, together with the editors, translated contributions from the French. We have been especially fortunate to work with Alan McIntosh who has brought a rare combination of skill, patience and good advice to the copy-editing and indexing of this book The editors have other, more personal debts to acknowledge. For Spencer, Janet Carsten has been a source of amused tolerance as the project drifted out of control, while Jessica Spencer gleefully set it all back a few months. Spencer learnt a great deal of what he knows about lexicography from John Simpson, Yvonne Warburton and Edmund Weiner of the Oxford English Dictionary. He learnt most, though, about the pleasure of words and food and many other things, from Julia Swannell. Barnard would like to thank Joy Barnard for putting up with his mild obsession for the biographical details of long-dead anthropologists, and for providing strength and the voice of common sense throughout the long hours the project has required. Corrie and Buster added the calm atmosphere that only cats can create, while Jake the labrador was as long-suffering as he was bemused by it all. Barnard has benefited much from discussions with his students too, especially those in ‘Anthropological Theory’. Their repeated request for a work of this kind has, we both hope, now been met with a source that both embodies their inspirations and serves their intellectual desires. ALAN BARNARD and JONATHAN SPENCER Edinburgh, January 1996 Introduction The very idea of an encyclopedia seems eminently anthropological—in at least two different ways. In its earliest use in classical Rome the term ‘encyclopedia’ referred to the ‘circle of learning’, that broad knowledge of the world which was a necessary part of any proper education. In its employment in post-Renaissance Europe it has come to refer more narrowly to attempts to map out systematically all that is known about the world. Anthropology likes to think of itself as the great encyclopedic discipline, provoking, criticizing, stimulating, and occasionally chastening its students by exposure to the extraordinary variety of ways in which people in different places and times have gone about the business of being human. But anthropology, through most of its 150–year history as an academic discipline, has also been alternately seduced and repulsed by the lure of great taxonomic projects to pin down and catalogue human differences. If anthropology is indeed the most encyclopedic of disciplines, it is not especially well—served with reference works of its own. This book aims to meet some of the need for an accessible and provocative guide to the many things that anthropologists have had to say. It focuses on the biggest and most influential area of anthropology, generally known as cultural anthropology in North America and social anthropology (or ethnology) in Europe. By combining ‘social’ and ‘cultural’, the American and the European, in our title we have tried to indicate our desire to produce a volume that reflects the diversity of anthropology as a genuinely global discipline. That desire is also shown in the topics we have covered, from nutrition to postmodernism, incest to essentialism, and above all in the specialists we have invited to contribute. Inside this book you will find a Brazilian anthropologist charting the anthropological history of the idea of society, an Indian reflecting on inequality, two Russians discussing ethnicity and an Australian writing on colonialism, as well as a systematic set of entries on what anthropologists have had to say about the lives and cultures of people living in different regions of the world. The great encyclopedic projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are, with grand theories of all kinds, rather out of fashion in contemporary anthropology. Classification, it is widely argued in the humanities and social sciences, is but one form of ‘normalization’, and even Murray’s great Oxford English Dictionary has been deconstructed to reveal a meaner project of imperial hegemony lurking beneath its elaborate Victorian structure. What the world does not need, it seems, is an encyclopedia which promises the last word and the complete truth on all that anthropologists know. (And what teachers of anthropology do not need, it might be added, is the prospect of endless course papers made up of apparently authoritative quotations from such a work.) Instead of attempting the impossible task of fitting all that our colleagues do into some final Procrustean schema, we have worked with more modest aims -to help our readers find their way around a discipline which is far too interesting and important to be left in the hands of academic specialists. Since the Second World War, anthropology has grown enormously, and its concerns are far wider than popular preconceptions about the study of ‘primitive peoples’. There is, now, an anthropology of capitalism and global consumerism, an anthropology of gender, an anthropology of war and an anthropology of peace; there is a lot of anthropology in museums but more and more anthropology of museums; anthropologists are still interested in the political life of people who live on the margins of the modern state, but they are also increasingly interested in nationalism and ethnicity and the rituals and symbols employed by modern politicians at the centre of modern states; anthropologists are often now employed to advise on development projects, but they have also started to look at the very idea of ‘development’ as a product of a particular culture and history, one more way to imagine what it is to be human. Even the idea of the ‘primitive’, it has lately been discovered, tells us rather more about the people who use the term to describe other people, than it does about the people so described. Readers should think of this book, then, as a guide and an introduction, a map which will help them find their way around the anthropological landscape rather than an authority set up to police what counts as anthropologically correct knowledge about the world. The readers we have imagined as we worked on the volume include, of course, students and coileagues in university departments of anthropology around the world; but they also include students and teachers in other disciplines—history, archaeology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies among many others—who may feel the need to come to terms with particular areas of anthropological work. Above all we hope we also reach all sorts of people who are plain curious about who anthropologists are, what they do, and what we can learn from them. We hope that all these different kinds of reader will find material here which stimulates and provokes as well as informs. Coverage and contributors In drawing up our headword list we tried to balance a number of considerations. Obviously we wanted to cover as broad a spectrum of contemporary social and cultural anthropology as we could, but we were also aware that anthropology is oddly self- conscious about its own past. Arguments in the present are frequently couched in the form of revisionist versions of familiar charter myths, and controversies between contemporaries ritually re-enact the great arguments of the ancestors. Students, in particular, often find this confusing, knowing little about the collective memory of the discipline and wondering why they should worry so much about the ancestors. When they read the ancestors, there is often further confusion—key terms like ‘culture’ or ‘structure’ have shifted meaning over time, while much of the argument at any one time has been about what exactly we should mean by these terms.