Volume 8, Number 4 · March 9, 1967
Culture Cults
By Edmund R. Leach
The Paths of Culture: A General Ethnology
by Kaj Birket-Smith
University of Wisconsin, 538 pp., $10.00
Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist
by Hortense Powdermaker
W.W. Norton, 315 pp., $6.50
The publishers describe The Paths of Culture as 'a general ethnology translated from the Danish' which has been 'long accepted as an anthropological classic'; they refer to its 'timeless appeal,' but they do not otherwise indicate its history. The original Danish two-volume version, Kulturens Veje, in fact appeared as long ago as 1941-42 and, apart from an odd footnote or two, a few extra paragraphs, and considerable modernization of the last few pages which deal with New World archeology, very little has happened to it since. Some of the results of this conservatism are very odd indeed. The book is avowedly a study in 'historical ethnology' which rests on the proposition that 'development itself is the essential problem of cultural research.' Its subject matter is the whole of human culture from China to Peru and from Adam until us. The author modestly admits that other viewpoints are possible and that there are limitations to his encyclopedic knowledge of the facts, nevertheless there is a clearly implied claim that the book is fully up-to-date—at page 472, for example, there is a reference to an archeological discovery first reported in 1963. It is therefore disconcerting to find that scarcely any American anthropologist under the age of seventy even merits a mention. My own countrymen do no better. Admittedly a crumb or two of approval is offered to 'the younger generation of British ethnologists,' but this term is actually applied to 'men like C. Daryll Forde, Raymond Firth and E. E. Evans-Pritchard'—distinguished scholars indeed, who in 1967 are all on the verge of retirement from their respective University Chairs. Birket-Smith himself is now aged seventy-three. It seems an odd quirk of academic publishing that a period piece such as this should first appear in English dress twenty-five years after its original publication, but its sponsors presumably know what they are doing.
Review, 1890 words
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