Anthropology in Europe
Disciplinary boundaries within the anthropological field differ. European institutions, for example, rarely use the “four-field approach” of American anthropology. Moreover, what in North America and Great Britain would be considered social or cultural anthropology has long been divided into two disciplines in much of central, eastern, and northern Europe. In German, the distinction has been made between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde, and, although these terms may now be somewhat outdated, they express the traditional divide clearly. One discipline was devoted to “the people”; it centred on national cultural traditions, particularly those of the peasantry, and could be seen, in its origins, as a scholarly wing of 19th-century Romantic nationalism. The other dealt with “peoples,” in the plural—particularly exotic, non-European peoples—and had its linkages to European global expansion and colonialism. Both studies were usually distinct from sociology. The discipline dealing with distant peoples and cultures usually was more closely related to the field of geography, with which it sometimes shared scholarly associations.
By the beginning of the 21st century, both disciplines had gone through important changes, although in academic organization they tended to remain separate. In places where the more nationally oriented discipline had borne the heavy burden of ideology linked to totalitarian regimes between the World Wars, even a term such as Volk had come to seem suspect. Moreover, there was increasingly less of a peasantry to study. This discipline, then, tended to redefine itself as concerned with “everyday life” and took on other names, such as “European ethnology.” In roughly the first half of the 20th century, the discipline that focused on non-European peoples had developed more strongly in the countries that had colonies, and the regional specializations had much to do with colonial connections: French anthropology was strong on West Africa and Oceania, Dutch anthropology on insular Southeast Asia and Suriname, Belgian anthropology on Central Africa; and what there was of a Portuguese anthropology predictably focused on Lusophone Africa. In much of Europe this discipline was labeled “ethnography” until the latter part of the century, when, under British and American influence, it often became “anthropology,” whether “social” or “cultural.” By then, in the early postcolonial period, it was increasingly associated with key concepts such as “the Third World” or “development,” and the discipline also grew significantly in European countries without much of a colonial past, such as those of Scandinavia. Yet there, as in the Anglophone countries, the emphasis on non-European societies gradually weakened as an increasing number of anthropologists began to practice what was described, sometimes quite loosely, as “anthropology at home.” With this change, the difference between what had been Volkskunde and Völkerkunde would seem to have less significance, but, to a degree, research traditions remain distinct and disciplinary professional identities strong.
Of the European anthropologies, apart from British anthropology, French anthropology has had the greatest long-term international influence. The work of Marcel Mauss, extending the work of the more generally sociological Durkheimian tradition into the mainstream of anthropology, was multifaceted but is especially remembered for his Essai sur le don (1925; The Gift), an analysis of “the gift,” including an examination of the concepts of reciprocity and exchange. The long-term work on West African worldviews (Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli [1948]) by the group around Marcel Griaule has perhaps been more admired than really influential. For several decades in the second half of the 20th century, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism (as detailed in such works as La Pensée sauvage, 1962) had a wide intellectual impact far outside the discipline of anthropology, and the work of Louis Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus, 1966) on hierarchy and inequality, especially in the South Asian context, also ranks among the classics of the discipline. In the 1970s the work of such “structural Marxists” as Maurice Godelier on modes of production and related concepts drew considerable attention. In the later decades of the 20th century, French influence on international anthropology was mostly associated with thinkers outside the discipline itself, such as the philosopher Michel Foucault and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; but it may be noted that much of Bourdieu’s influence dates to his earlier “anthropological” period, drawing on work in Algeria.
Anthropology in the German-speaking countries had a high international profile in the early part of the 20th century, when it centred on culture history, culture areas, and cultural diffusion. Such interests became increasingly marginal in the discipline elsewhere, and German anthropology went into a period of stagnation in the interwar years, although some individuals remained in the forefront; Richard Thurnwald, for example, is sometimes mentioned as one of the progenitors of functionalism in anthropology. After World War II, as the discipline reconstructed itself, German anthropologists tended to be more preoccupied with detailed ethnography than with more general theoretical concerns, and they increasingly followed the lines of intellectual development emerging elsewhere in the discipline. The fact that German anthropologists write mostly in German—in a period when that language is no longer widely used in the academy—has undoubtedly had a part in making them less noticeable in international intellectual exchange.
Anthropologists in eastern and central Europe during the communist period were unable to communicate easily with colleagues on the other side of the Iron Curtain. For historical reasons, the Volkskunde variant of the discipline tended to be stronger than the Völkerkunde variant, and, in order to survive, it fairly mechanically absorbed a sufficient amount of Marxist-Leninist vocabulary. In the Soviet Union the discipline of ethnography was in large part devoted to the study of the non-Russian peoples of the national periphery. An approach to the study of ethno-national groups was developed that was congruous with Soviet nationality policy as introduced by Stalin, combining a somewhat superficial recognition of cultural identities with integration into the communist state. In the years after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, anthropologists in Russia and other countries formerly under its domination increasingly oriented themselves toward the contemporary currents of anthropology in western Europe and North America, although, on the whole, the concomitant economic upheavals made academic work very difficult.
Generally speaking, sociocultural anthropology in most European countries is no longer characterized by distinctive “national traditions.” Outside the old colonial powers, it grew considerably only in roughly the latter third of the 20th century. To a degree it is marked by the centre-periphery relationships of international academic life, insofar as some of the pioneers in various countries had their training in the United States, Great Britain, and France; one can sometimes discern a stronger French influence in southern Europe and a stronger Anglophone influence in northern Europe. Yet scholarly interactions within European anthropology are now no longer so dependent on old centres. The formation of a European Association of Social Anthropologists in 1989 encouraged more crosscutting linkages, and from its beginnings this association included researchers from all parts of a continent no longer divided by an Iron Curtain.