The very idea of an encyclopedia seems eminently anthropological—in at least two
different ways. In its earliest use in classical Rome the term ‘encyclopedia’ referred to the
‘circle of learning’, that broad knowledge of the world which was a necessary part of any
proper education. In its employment in post-Renaissance Europe it has come to refer
more narrowly to attempts to map out systematically all that is known about the world.
Anthropology likes to think of itself as the great encyclopedic discipline, provoking,
criticizing, stimulating, and occasionally chastening its students by exposure to the
extraordinary variety of ways in which people in different places and times have gone
about the business of being human. But anthropology, through most of its 150–year
history as an academic discipline, has also been alternately seduced and repulsed by the
lure of great taxonomic projects to pin down and catalogue human differences.
If anthropology is indeed the most encyclopedic of disciplines, it is not especially
well—served with reference works of its own. This book aims to meet some of the need
for an accessible and provocative guide to the many things that anthropologists have had
to say. It focuses on the biggest and most influential area of anthropology, generally
known as cultural anthropology in North America and social anthropology (or ethnology)
in Europe. By combining ‘social’ and ‘cultural’, the American and the European, in our
title we have tried to indicate our desire to produce a volume that reflects the diversity of
anthropology as a genuinely global discipline. That desire is also shown in the topics we
have covered, from nutrition to postmodernism, incest to essentialism, and above all in
the specialists we have invited to contribute. Inside this book you will find a Brazilian
anthropologist charting the anthropological history of the idea of society, an Indian
reflecting on inequality, two Russians discussing ethnicity and an Australian writing on
colonialism, as well as a systematic set of entries on what anthropologists have had to say
about the lives and cultures of people living in different regions of the world.
The great encyclopedic projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are, with
grand theories of all kinds, rather out of fashion in contemporary anthropology.
Classification, it is widely argued in the humanities and social sciences, is but one form
of ‘normalization’, and even Murray’s great Oxford English Dictionary has been
deconstructed to reveal a meaner project of imperial hegemony lurking beneath its
elaborate Victorian structure. What the world does not need, it seems, is an encyclopedia
which promises the last word and the complete truth on all that anthropologists know.
(And what teachers of anthropology do not need, it might be added, is the prosp