In Search of Man

...Reviewed by Michael Lieber Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Wellesley Robin Fox, usually a provocative and interesting anthropologist, has written a tendentious and disappointing book...

...Despite the protestations of Fox, Robert Ardrey and some others, I believe this is also the position of most practicing anthropologists...

...True, the development of such an ethic may be aided by anthropology, but ultimately it can only be constructed through the mind's consideration of what is good and bad about life, and not through the scientist's assessment of what is best for the species as defined by evolutionary adaptation...

...Because of his essentially biological orientation, Fox contends that the best way to investigate human beings is to study them together with other primates...

...Of course, Encounter with Anthropology should not be judged by its ethnographic middle...

...The rest consists of a predictable discussion of race, plus several rather tired studies on speech in social contexts and religion and witchcraft that are based on Fox's own ethnographic work in Ireland and among the Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest...

...This is a peculiar sort of confessional critique, illuminating little beyond the author's frustration with his discipline...

...Although I, too, doubt that an ethic will arise out of the comparative method of social anthropology, I do not think that, as Fox suggests, it will emerge from a determination of man's "nature...

...Besides, an examination of the ethnographic record seems to show that what is best for one part of the species will always be second best for another part...

...With casual arrogance, he warns us that either anthropology must come around to righting this grievous state of affairs or else he will have to detach himself from the study altogether...

...This, he maintains, makes it impossible to articulate a general viewpoint on what is satisfactory and unsatisfactory about human life...

...Anthropology has failed to live up to its promise as a total, integrated "science of man," Fox believes, and has instead become bogged down in a continuing attempt to demonstrate the obvious and refine already overly detailed ethnographic descriptions...

...Many others have discussed sociolinguistics and American Indian religion far better than Fox does...

...After all, what better way can one learn about man than by looking at how he lives his life in a variety of contexts...

...Anthropologists have explained the social simply in terms of the social, Fox feels, and this is a tautologism...

...Moreover, he overstates the worthlessness of ethnographic specifics, and this is particularly odd because his own work—as evidenced by certain chapters in this volume—is distinguished by its attention to just such details...

...Unfortunately, in the course of encountering anthropology and finding it wanting, Fox has set up a number of straw men...

...In so doing, they have disregarded the biological dimension in human culture...

...And those who, unlike myself, are inclined toward Fox's position, are likely to find much to admire in his forceful polemic...

...Fox's notion of an ideal anthropology entails deemphasizing field-work and adopting a general theoretical framework, one that would deal with man as an organism involved in the evolutionary process and treat culture as an adaptation to evolutionary necessity...

...For example, while it is true that anthropologists have in the past tended to denigrate a broad evolutionary perspective, his criticisms have little relation to current attitudes, which are fully cognizant of the evolutionary process...

...Such an endeavor might indeed teach us a great deal about primates in general, yet I suspect it would tell us much less about human beings than ethnography—with its attempts to describe what people are like by observing them at close range over long periods of time...

...If this is accurate, one can hardly hope to arrive at the universal values Fox expects anthropology to provide...

...Although Fox's attack against what he sees as conventional anthropology runs through his entire volume, it is most fully articulated in his Introduction, in an epilogue entitled "Anthropology Tomorrow" and in a lengthy chapter called "The Culture Animal...

...To belittle ethnography as Fox does is to put down the finest and most distinctive feature of the discipline he says he wants to resuscitate...

...Fox further argues that anthropology's concentration on cultural diversity, analyzed through field-work, with no attention to man's universally distributed features, has led to a position of extreme ethical relativism...

...Of the book's less controversial chapters, the most interesting are on marriage, family and sexual behavior—Fox's forte...

...Fox claims that his colleagues have exaggerated man's distinctiveness and have shied away from viewing Homosapiens as a species descended from pre-hominid primate fore bears...