On the Relevance of the Classics to Anthropology: Critically Re-engaging an Old Argument
WANG Mingming
2020, 40(2):
42-75.
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Most of the founders of anthropology attached great importance to the classics. By contrast, in the early half of the 20th century, anthropologists rarely thought of relating their ethnographic findings and theories to the subject. In Anthropology and the Classics published posthumously, Clyde Kluckhohn, one of the leading American cultural anthropologists, reflected on the change. Kluckhohn reviewed the history of reciprocity between the two important human sciences and forcefully argued for building a new bridge between them. He argued that the foundations of anthropology were humanism and science. These were laid during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but they were deeply rooted in ancient Greek “cultural grammar” and its intellectual expressions. For modern anthropology to recover its humanist and scientific vitality, as Kluckhohn insisted, it was necessary to go back to the classics whereby the (Western) anthropologists could (1) dig deeper into the history of their discipline(s) and (2) include the study of the culture of Antiquity in their scope.
The author writes the present review article more than half a century after Kluckhohn made his calling. To do justice to Kluckhohn's long forgotten text, he spends two full sections on Kluckhohn's history of reciprocity between anthropology and the classics, outline of the ancient Greek anthropological perspectives, and synopsis of Greek “cultural grammar”. He seeks to restore the project Kluckhohn developed. Considering it from a broader scope of disciplinary history, the author finds Kluckhohn's critique of the social science utilitarian facet of modern Western anthropology inspiring. As he points out, core to Kluckhohn's project was a turn toward the revival of the humanistic tradition of anthropology which has remained to be realized.
In re-engaging Kluckhohn's argument, the author is also critical of it. In the much extended concluding section, he reconsiders Kluckhohn's text in the terms of its following shortcomings:
(1) In various places, Kluckhohn contrasted Ancient Greek “culture” and Christian “ethics”, implying that many similarities can be discovered between the ancient West and the “primitive others” studied by the anthropologists. In “exceptionalizing” Christianity, he excluded Biblical anthropology from his explanation and made his understanding of the “Westernness” of Western anthropology short of a reflection on its “theological anxiety”.
(2) To achieve his “comprehension of past and present relations between the classics and anthropology”, Kluckhohn relied too heavily upon his knowledge of Anglo-American anthropology and German philological ethnology and classics to leave any space for the achievements of L' Année sociologique, some of which in fact form a comparative approach to the classics.
(3) The concept of “culture” as applied in Anthropology and the Classics is also problematic. It makes Kluckhohn's project less inclusive than the evolutionist perspective of the “transitional/intermediary type”-e.g., that provided by Robert Marett and his associates (Marett ed., 1908)-in which a notion of the “translation” between other and self could be rediscovered. Consequently, certain “accidental resemblances” between the cosmologies of ancient China and Greece got clear of Kluckhohn's eyesight. Kluckhohn believed that among the several “Axial Age breakthroughs” only the ancient Greek one, with its unique humanism and scientific spirit, was the soil from which anthropology grew. Because he perceived the classics with which anthropology was to get re-affiliated as exceptionally Western, Kluckhohn failed to offer an adequately comparative and historical perspective for anthropology-now much an inter-cultural cosmo-political mission.
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