Readers expecting a straightforward chronology of anthropological approaches to the study of culture will not find it in Regna Darnell’s new book, which, despite its title, is nothing like a unified history of a discipline or of that discipline’s specific methodological or theoretical commitments. It is more accurate to say that the book, assembled from previously-published essays, book chapters, and presentations, is a series of conversations swirling around both the practice of disciplinary history by and for anthropologists, and certain emergent theoretical and methodological trends over the past century or so of the discipline’s existence—what Darnell herself refers to as “some of my own ‘aha’ moments” (xxiv). This is not a criticism per se: the book contains many deep explorations of anthropological history that help to flesh out aspects of the field’s story which may be unfamiliar to scholars in adjacent disciplines. But it does not provide a linear timeline of that story, opting instead to linger on specific themes, debates, and disciplinary pedigrees that strike Darnell as especially salient.
Darnell explores a diverse array of topics across the book’s nineteen chapters, ranging from an interrogation of the usefulness of oral history in the first, to the shifting anthropological construction of the idea of culture in the third, a comparison of the Northwestern ethnographic projects of Boas and Lévi-Strauss in the seventh, the Indigenous language classification system of John Wesley Powell in the tenth and eleventh, and the development of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology in the fourteenth. Four chapters, positioned at the end of the book, are obituaries of the anthropologists Fredericka de Laguna, Dell Hymes, George W. Stocking, Jr., and Anthony F.C. Wallace. Throughout, Darnell’s historiographic interests are calibrated to her specific position as a linguistic anthropologist.
For folklorists, especially useful sections include the championing of oral history in chapter 1; the discussion of Boas’s and Lévi-Strauss’s approaches to folk narrative in chapter 7; and the “historicist reconstruction” (151) of Boas’s cultural theory in chapter 9. Also helpful is Darnell’s response, in chapter 3, to the “critique of culture” and the challenges to ethnographic research represented by the emergence of cultural studies. Here Darnell outlines six aspects of anthropological research (which we can easily extend to contemporary folkloristics) that address this critique (59-60): 1) the shift toward thinking of research participants as “consultants” or “collaborators” as opposed to “informants,” and the growing recognition of the mutual subjectivity of scholar and Other; 2) the acknowledgement of the multiple group identities and shifting contexts of cultural performance, in contrast to past assumptions of rigidly bounded communities; 3) the continuing importance of participant observation; 4) the recognition of the possibility for realistic descriptions of reality that do not purport to be universally or objectively true or complete; 5) engagement with “a subcurrent of local knowledges and political positionings” (60) that have emerged in response to globalization; and 6) the confrontation with anthropology’s role in the colonial enterprise.
Folklore is mostly absent from Darnell’s treatment of anthropological history, except when it appears (in exclusively oral narrative form) as the object of study of earlier anthropologists like Boas and Lévi-Strauss. On one level this is understandable: the unfortunate disciplinary divide between folkloristics and anthropology is longstanding, and it would be beyond the scope of this work to treat this divide fully. Such a complete history would require marshalling not one, but two vast bodies of scholarly literature. But the absence itself highlights the problems with ignoring our fields’ linked histories. For example, Darnell says of narratives shared by her Indigenous research participants: “The stories are not all the same, but nor is the variation random. When one reaches a point of saturation where new types of stories do not appear, the ‘sample’ is large enough. This is reliability; it turns to distinctive features… that explain the variability among types of what I call ‘generic narratives’” (40). Familiar folkloristic concepts—the personal experience narrative, tradition and variation, and the very idea of collecting narratives—are clearly discernible here, but are assigned new labels, and no mention is made of folkloristic scholarship that deals with these topics. It seems that Darnell imagines a stark distinction between personal narrative as oral history (and therefore subject to the concerns of historians, as she discusses in the first chapter) and other kinds of narratives less explicitly concerned with verifiable historicity and more strongly associated with a limited view of folklore as traditional, and largely imaginative, stories. More engagement with post-1960s folkloristic scholarship—which was, after all, heavily influenced by the same linguistic anthropological currents in which Darnell’s own work is situated—would have been especially useful.
This is, however, a relatively minor point. In all, Darnell’s work provides a useful meditation on changing realities within disciplinary anthropology. The work may also provide motivation for folklorists to incorporate their own disciplinary history more fully into that of anthropology, and in so doing work to bridge the unfortunate gap between our fields.
--------
[Review length: 821 words • Review posted on December 14, 2024]