When I reviewed the Concise Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Morris, 2012) (RR 2013/010), I noted that Reference Reviews had reviewed innumerable anthropological reference sources over the years. The most recent I had looked at before then was the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Barnard and Spencer, 2010) (RR 2011/067). We have examined dictionaries, such as The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies (Barker, 2005) (RR 2005/022); encyclopedias, such as Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art (McCormick and White, 2011) (RR 2011/360); and biographical reference books, such as the Biographical Dictionary of Anthropology (Amit, 2004) (RR 2004/240). There have been lots of books on research methods, for example, Key Concepts in Social Research Methods (Gomm, 2009) (RR 2009/362) and reference tools to particular aspects of anthropology, such as A Companion to Psychological Anthropology (Casey and Edgerton, 2005) (RR 2005/235). We have also examined a fair number of relevant websites, such as AnthroSource.net (American Anthropological Association, 2016) (RR 2006/130), Anthropological Index Online (Royal Anthropological Institute, 2016) (RR 2006/012) or the now discontinued Anthropology Biography Web (RR 2004/069). Practically every issue of Reference Reviews contains reviews of social science reference tools that are potentially useful for anthropologists. It might seem, therefore, that any library with a need for anthropological information has had ample opportunity to stock up already. Ashgate Publishers obviously feel that there is still a gap in the market and have commissioned this sturdy handbook to fill it.
Anthropology is a curious subject. My general impression is that sociology arose from the efforts of educated and affluent westerners to try to understand the lives of the poorer members of their own societies, while anthropology grew from the efforts of educated and affluent westerners to try to understand the lives of their colonial subjects and other, different (poorer) people that they came into contact with during the course of imperial expansion. As society has become increasingly homogenous, and as non-western societies have developed their own affluent and educated westernized classes, one might have expected the two disciplines to coalesce, but only one of the contributors here seems to have fully appreciated that non-western societies “no longer needed us to identify who and what they were, since they were perfectly capable of doing the job themselves”.
The continuing growth of academic anthropology, on the one hand, and the increasing westernization of the world, on the other, mean that there is a shortage of “other” societies to study. As one of the contributors here points out, “Anthropology has come a long way from those days when one would go off to field sites where they were the first or only ethnographer in the field. Today one often finds oneself alongside several, if not tens, of anthropologists, and their students, working in the same city or village, and even on similar topics”.
All the authors clearly tried to look for changes and new approaches, but most of them still seem to be working through the same subject areas and sub-disciplines that were studied in all the previous anthropological handbooks we have reviewed here.
Part 1 focuses on Religion, with chapters on healing, on mortuary rituals in Japan, etc. Part 2 covers Ritual, Myth and Creativity, with chapters on dreams, sacrifice, charisma, etc. Part 3 covers Work, Play and Gender. Part 4 is entitled Studies of World Religions, but only contains two chapters – an oddity analyzing the shifting relationship between Christianity and anthropology and one giving us some notes on the anthropology of Islam. Part 5 on Perspectives on Violence & Globalization consists of three chapters – on ethnographies of political violence, on warfare and ritual and an excellent chapter on globalization. The final part is entitled Emergent Themes. I am not sure why it is called that, as it contains chapters on the well-worn topics of languages in social change, indigenous knowledge, the relationship between philosophy and anthropology, an oddity on the Iliad and a final chapter by the book’s editors on disaster anthropology. There might be a few new approaches to old themes, but the only “emergent” themes here, it seems to me, are globalization and disaster anthropology.
The book does not attempt to be encyclopedic – there are some standard topics which are not touched on. Nor is it a research textbook. We have reviewed innumerable books on social science research methods which can be used for that purpose. The chapters vary very widely in quality and relevance. The chapter on Warfare & Ritual is largely given over to a study of a single Bronze/Early Iron Age steppe graveyard which would be of enormous interest if published in an archaeological journal, but seems slightly out of context here. The same goes for the study of the Iliad. The chapter on Ethnographies of Political Violence is mainly a chatty personal account of trying to do fieldwork in the Lebanon during a time of disruption. The disappointing chapter on philosophy is largely taken up by a picaresque memoir of a Romanian Jew who escaped the Nazis and eventually ended up in Canada. The only philosophical message I could get from it is that life is what happens, which does not really increase my understanding of either philosophy or anthropology.
Most of the other chapters are good standard scholarly work, providing clear summaries of recent research in their fields. If you want to nit-pick, then you can always find minor errors – an anthropological examination of ritual behaviors outside the religious context is extremely welcome, but you launch a ship by breaking a bottle of wine over its bows not its stern, just for example. I did not notice any serious errors however.
As usual, all of the 20 contributors and both of the editors are academics from universities in USA or Western Europe. The day when I find that a Papuan professor has managed to get the funds to embed him into some stratum of New York society and has then been allowed to publish his anthropological observations in a major textbook is the day when I will believe that anthropology has really embraced the idea of change.
It is, perhaps, unfair to criticize a “companion” for not focusing on new themes. A companion like this should be a guide to the whole intellectual heritage of anthropology and should continue to support the topics which have been central to the subject since it started to emerge as a separate discipline 150 years or so ago. On the whole, the editors have succeeded. It still seems to me, speaking personally, that the future of anthropology lies in the application of the skills and insights it has developed to sociology – to the study of our own rather than “other” societies, but in the meantime, work goes on and students need companions.
Most academic libraries catering for students of anthropology will probably have a broad range of handbooks, etc., in stock already. Those that do not can be recommended to consider this as a broad-based source of useful material. There is the reading matter for a good advanced student seminar in most of the chapters here. The study of “other” societies is a subject of wide general interest, which should be catered for by public libraries, but it seems to me to be unlikely that this book will appeal to general readers; I would see it more as a source of ideas for more advanced students.
