But I return to the history of anthropology within the British sphere of influence. It reveals widespread dissatisfaction with the theory and method required for comparative analysis by the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1892 edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for example, C.H. Read observed that the passing traveller could not obtain “even superficial answers” to the questions anthropologists wanted answered; only persons with “long-continued residence among a native race” were trustworthy informants.^[37] And when in 1902 A.C. Haddon described Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia as “the best book of its kind about any people”, he signalled the claims to authority of a new style of anthropologist, persons such as Baldwin Spencer and himself, trained scientists, whose specialized observational skills were more reliable (and more rapid) means to collect accurate information than the intellectual habits formed during “long continued residence among a native race”, and whose primary task was to accumulate detailed knowledge of delimited areas — which might be, but need not be, used in comparative analyses.^[38] Authoritative judgements entailed personal experience of field research among the peoples the anthropologist wished to describe — periods of research that became possible with the development of academic careers, such as Haddon and Spencer enjoyed. Field trips of a year or more would become the anthropological gold standard in the twentieth century, when anthropologists had better opportunities for financing them with the patronage of private philanthropies and government agencies, but in earlier times it became possible to do fieldwork for the simple reason that academic lives were punctuated by long breaks.^[39] Much of the research for Native Tribes was done during Spencer’s 1896–97 summer vacation from his position as Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne, when he was able to work with Gillen in Central Australia. There, Gillen, a civil servant who was given leave to work with Spencer, was the effective administrator of the area’s Aborigines, and had accumulated a good deal of ethnographic knowledge during two decades’ residence.

Haddon urged researchers to understand exotic peoples from the “native point of view”, an injunction echoed by Spencer and Gillen when they argued that anthropologists must enter “into the mental attitude of the native”. Though the “genealogical method” Rivers developed for the Torres Straits expedition proved remarkably durable, however, Haddon’s venture did not provide an imitable model. Taking seven men to spend roughly seven months living for periods of variable length on one or another portion of an island cluster, dividing investigative labour among themselves, the Torres Straits expedition constituted a hybrid genre of anthropology. The six volumes of Reports Haddon edited — five published before World War I, and the last (Volume I) in 1935 — received largely favourable reviews, but they were, in part, exercises in old-style research, relying on evidence that Haddon solicited from afar to supplement the information his team had gathered in the field. Moreover, while teamwork remained common in natural scientific practice (and one could say that practitioners of the comparative method were members of informally constituted teams), teamwork did not become anthropology’s ideal method. Rather, Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes became an exemplar. It represented an approximation of the anthropological method that would soon be conventional: a comprehensive study of a delimited area, based on sustained fieldwork conducted by one or two people (if the latter, often a husband and wife), portraying a population’s distinctive character.

The significance of Native Tribes in the era of its publication was rather different, however. In 1913, for example, Bronislaw Malinowski said of Spencer and Gillen’s studies that “half the total production in anthropological theory ha[d] been based upon their work, and nine-tenths affected or modified by it”. Native Tribes inspired an intense international debate, arguably the most international of controversies in anthropology’s history. As E. Sidney Hartland had observed in 1900, so pervasive was the debate that the “quiet non-combatant student” was “astonished to find himself in the theatre of war”, assaulted by “jarring theories and conflicting claims”, and “searching in vain” for “a bomb-proof burrow”. The debate was framed by J.G. Frazer (broker of the book’s publication by Macmillan). It was predicated on the assumption that indigenous Australians were the most primitive of living peoples, whose totemism was (somehow) at the base of civilization’s highest achievements — monogamous marriage and truly spiritual religion. Sustained with intensity through the mid-1920s, the debate proved irresolvable in Frazer’s terms. Pondering conflicting interpretations of totemism, anthropologists rejected unilinear models of social evolution like Frazer’s; if nothing else, they agreed that it was impossible to grade peoples according to the rate at which they were making progress from savagery to civilization because evolution everywhere did not fit a single pattern.

In the early twentieth century, bounded populations of professional anthropologists emerged, developing various theoretical schemes; international intellectual exchanges were impeded by language barriers. Some (although certainly not all) of these anthropologists insisted that the indigenous peoples of their countries — such as those in North America and Australia — were quite distinctive, defying comparison with groups elsewhere; it is interesting to note that these included Spencer and Gillen, who lamented the absence of a special term for the Australian variety of totemism, which they considered unlike any other. Some anthropologists, particularly those in German-speaking areas, as well as those influenced in North America by the German-born and -trained Franz Boas, dedicated themselves to varieties of historical analyses, but their understanding of historical change was informed by attention to particularities of time and place. In the United States, for example, sociocultural anthropologists chose a truly historical approach, emphasizing the unique characteristics that distinguished peoples from one another; Boas himself decried efforts to produce profound generalizations from cross-cultural comparisons (his students would later disagree). In sum, concerted efforts to use the comparative method to solve a problem that all participants in the debate over totemism had initially agreed was important had resulted in consensus that totemism was not a unitary phenomenon wherever it was found, that evolution did not follow a standard course, and that the comparative method was impracticable.^[40]

Twentieth-century British anthropologists did not abandon their predecessors' aspirations to formulate scientific generalizations. But they repudiated the notion that laws of development that obtained in all societies. Instead, they attempted to document the postulate that all societies were fundamentally identical, all of them sharing certain essential properties, all performing the same basic functions. And they reasoned that the point of studying so-called simple (or technologically underdeveloped) societies was not that these societies were qualitatively different from technologically sophisticated ones but that they were relatively simple to study, a point also made by Émile Durkheim (among others).^[41]

That is, the functionalists who dominated British anthropology from the late 1920s to the 1960s dismissed efforts at historical explanations as nonsensical — as expressions of the genetic fallacy. Consider the 1911 pronouncement of the young Malinowski, who would shortly become a protégé of Baldwin Spencer (although he would see Spencer as his enemy within a decade):

Defining the fundamental principle of functionalist anthropology as that “in every type of civilisation, every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfills some vital function…represent[ing] an indispensable part within a working whole”, Malinowski said in 1926 that evolutionary progress “consist[ed] not in a sequence of different forms changing one into another, but in a better adaptation of an institution to its function” [emphasis mine].^[43]

A quarter-century later, Haddon and Rivers’s most distinguished student, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, who was Malinowski’s (sometimes antagonistic) co-conspirator in the establishment of functionalist paramountcy, was still making similar arguments, saying that there was no point in attempting to chronicle the histories of non-literate societies because such societies did not leave reliable written records. But even if accurate histories could be plotted somehow, they would be irrelevant to the primary goal of social anthropology. As he said: “History, in the proper sense of the term, as an authentic account of the succession of events in a particular region over a particular period of time, cannot give us generalizations.” He endorsed cross-cultural comparisons, however, saying that the comparative method was “one by which we pass from the particular to the general, from the general to the more general, with the end in view that we may in this way arrive at the universal, at characteristics which may be found in different forms in all human societies”.^[44] In short, the functionalists' position, as articulated with exceptional clarity by Radcliffe-Brown, was to support cross-cultural research, but to suggest that whatever insights might be gleaned through use of the comparative method would not likely challenge the generalizations the anthropologist could produce from a single case study, since all societies were fundamentally alike.

But then, during the 1960s and 1970s, the functionalist model became a target of ridicule, much as the evolutionist model had been a target before it. Certainly, one might say that reports of functionalism’s death have been greatly exaggerated, or, at least, that functionalist analysis persists in truncated form. No self-respecting anthropologist today would open herself to ridicule by postulating that any given society constitutes a bounded whole, in which all component parts are integrated in a mutually reinforcing system; but she will, nevertheless, describe interdependent beliefs and practices (as, indeed, she should).^[45] One might also note that certain of evolutionists’ assumptions were never thoroughly dispelled, either; not the least of these being that those societies which it is no longer politically correct to call “primitive” are in some sense doomed, bound to lose their idiosyncratic characteristics as they are caught up in the whirlwind of globalization; my point is that it should not be assumed that these societies experience historical change in a distinctive way.

Regardless, contemporary anthropologists' definition of their purview has changed, returning to one approximating that of the nineteenth century. Once again, anthropologists study the entire world, not just technologically unsophisticated peoples — although the student who writes his Ph.D. thesis on homelessness in New York City, say, or on the conditions of innovation in a biotechnology company, may find herself hard-pressed to find an academic job as an anthropologist in the United States, since many anthropology departments continue to place high value on fieldwork in remote places. Interestingly, in Britain, unlike in the United States, sociocultural anthropologists who do their Ph.D. fieldwork in their own society are as likely to find academic employment as those who do research abroad.^[46] But, then, our young, non-traditional anthropologist may find herself non-academic employment, as many anthropologists do nowadays, in which her anthropological skills may prove to have commercial value. Not the least of her marketable skills (and certainly not the only one) is her capacity to appreciate cross-cultural variation, an important asset in the global marketplace: consider the anthropologist whose job it is to appreciate local differences in the use of ostensibly culture-free technology, such as computers.^[47] In some disciplines — say, economics, biology and physics — practical application has enhanced the discipline’s prestige in the eyes of both practitioners and laypersons. Perhaps academic anthropology will now abandon the haughty disdain for applied work that it has sustained for more than half a century.