It is said that Banks’ “Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands” is a founding document of anthropology, that much maligned study. In it, Banks writes of typical style for the time, “In the Island of Otaheite where Love is the Chief Occupation, the favourite, nay almost the Sole Luxury of the Inhabitants, both the bodies and souls of the women are modeld in the utmost perfection for that soft science.” Founding for centuries of cultural destruction and still imperfect and pernicious ideas; how does this compare with the founding of other studies? As I see it, philosophy (surely the earliest and purest study) is hard to pin down to a core notion, but what we take as philosophy today (in the West) remains innocuous by most accounts. Slightly more troubling is what we now refer to as political science, originating (it seems), with Hellenistic ideas, but really getting traction in the 1200s in the Arabic world (al-Kindi to al-Farabi especially). Late entries, such as Economics are a rather mixed bag, splintering from radical origins to current catholic hegemonies. But, alas, Anthropology, borne out of Romance and wonderment, seems to have always been ahead of itself, yet always behind it proginator (natural philosophy). Can Anthropology recover from it’s storied history? Does studying the anthros imply Foucaldian categories? Can we help but shape subjectivities in study, as a natural kind of Heisenbergian uncertainty? Maybe we should cut our losses, and cull the anthros.
