The Loss of Integration Vs. Unity in Diversity: American Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s and the Founding of the Society for Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

This dissertation explores historically the founding of the SCA by investigating the intellectual, political, institutional, social, and financial factors that shaped the form it came to take. It emphasizes the historical contingency through which academic institutions come into existence, highlighting there was nothing inevitable about the changes that spurred the SCA into existence. As an example of the challenges of doing recent American history of the 1970s and 1980s of a discipline not well historicized, its primary contribution is contextualizing the social, institutional, and intellectual changes in anthropology as a discipline in a dual sense of the relation of disciplinary changes with outside social and political context. It charts changes in the discipline of anthropology and the outside world by chronicling generational conflicts between different cohorts of scholars over the direction and identity of anthropology. Through discussion of the formation of the SCA, the dissertation also highlights factors arising in the 1970s and 1980s leading to the sense of failure or impossibility of anthropology as an integrative, holistic, and comparative discipline, a change that was particularly distressing to earlier generations of American anthropologists. These changes included the fragmentation of subdisciplines, the abandonment of four-field anthropology, and new politically aggressive approaches, all of which fomented a sense of crisis in American anthropology in the 1960s, which continues to influence the discipline until the present.