Editor’s introduction

Abstract

Anthropology and philosophy intertwine like the strands of DNA, twisting and crossing paths with frequency over millennia. At the very dawn of what we consider to be Western philosophy, Socrates, as described by Plato, applies an evolutionary model to understanding political forms. In Book VIII of The Republic, Plato describes a succession of political formations that follow the overthrow of aristocracy leading, penultimately, to democracy and then finally descending into tyranny. I would remark that, from the perspective of 2018, this model seems superior to that developed by 19th-century anthropologists, although a certain resemblance to the brooding conclusion to Morgan’s Ancient Society can be seen. The first self-proclaimed academic anthropologist was the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who lectured on the topic for 25 years. Although he would have little direct influence on the subsequent professional development of the discipline, certainly his influence on later philosophers, such as Herder and Dilthey, who would in turn help shape anthropology, was great. For most of its history as a separate discipline, anthropology actively eschewed philosophy, even when working on similar problems. There were a few exceptions: Herbert Spencer, who synthesized a philosophy of evolution, influenced the first generation of anthropologists. However, Franz Boas, a colleague and friend of John Dewey, with whom he who co-taught a seminar on comparative ethics at Columbia University, never mentions that connection in his publications, even The Mind of Primitive Man, which covered much the same territory as the seminar presumably did (Harkin 2017). Ruth Benedict was perhaps the only prominent American anthropologist to explicitly draw on philosophical thought, most notably Nietzsche’s Dionysian-Apollonian duality, and gestalt theory. But for the most part anthropologists were eager to identify rather with social science and science writ large, than what was seen by many as a vestigial discipline. This mutual avoidance began to break down mid-century, in part by the post-war translation of French anthropology and philosophy into English. French anthropology has always been more aware of, and willing to engage with, philosophy. Most important, from the Anglophone perspective, was Claude Lévi-Strauss, a philosophy student as an undergraduate, who throughout his writings engages with the French philosophical tradition (Descartes, Rousseau, Bergson) and with the most prominent school of none defined