According to the recent Times Higher Education Supplement article on the “The Great Divide” between social anthropologists and evolutionary anthropologists,
“This division dates back to the 1970s, when eminent American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (now retired emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara) presented his work on the Yanomami tribes of Venezuela in the context of evolutionary biology.”
See the comments for a more nuanced take, such as this one by S. Diaz-Garcia:
“‘The Great Divide’ by Hannah Fearn does not take into account the historical background of the theoretical schism in anthropology since its inception. Boas, a cultural relativist and physical anthropologist, was keenly interested in collecting and analyzing quantitative data of the whole spectrum of society. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, functionalist-structuralists and social anthropologists, were more concerned about interpretations of components within a society (e.g., kinship, caste, class, mode of production and reproduction). Hence, cultural anthropology became more closely associated with physical and biological anthropology, and social anthropology became aligned with sociology and structuralisms. In time, it could be argued that cognitive sciences became a bridge between the two, particularly as applied by ethnoscience. As I recall, when I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1980s, we had two very well defined moities (cf. Apinaye: A World Divided for All): (1) The social anthropologists and structuralists (William Shack, Elizabeth Colson, Gerald Berreman, Jack Potter, Laura Nader, and Paul Rabinow), who were housed on the second and third floors of Kroeber Hall; and (2) The cultural anthropologists and cognitivists (Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, William Geoghegan, and Eugene Hammel), who were housed at the Quantitative Anthropology Laboratory (QAL) in a quite separate location. It was quite laborious for QAL folks to walk a couple of blocks to ger their mail at Kroeber. Geographic separation was critical in maintaining theoretical domains. It was de rigeur for graduate students to join either the quantitative or the qualitative side early on, and this expressed alignment had to be upheld throughout their course of studies at Berkeley. These alignments determined things like research connections in the US and overseas, approval of field-statements, composition of dissertation committees, the degree itself, and whether or not the earned degree would be worth anything at all in terms of employment and publications. But this is a very long story and worthy of being told at length in book form with full documentation.”
Michael Stewart over at Cognition and Culture also finds Hannah Fearn’s THES article overly simplistic, remarking that “few of my colleagues have serious difficulties today with accepting that genetic studies are part of our discipline”. He then goes on to show just how collaborative the social/cultural and evolutionary/biological wings of the discipline really are:
“Curiously, in the very week that that THES published its claims, together with two colleagues at UCL, a material culture specialist (Susanne Kuechler) and a biological/primatologist (Volker Sommer), I was putting the finishing touches to a new, ‘three field’ course on The Anthropology of Mind. From next September, finalist undergraduates in our department – where all students follow a three field program - will discuss a number of issues where our divergent approaches will, hopefully produce some interesting refractions on old debates.”
