Culture-historical reconstruction and mythology in the anthropology of Paul Radin

Autor: David B. Zilberman
Rok vydání: 1982
Předmět:
Zdroj: Dialectical Anthropology. 6:275-290
ISSN: 1573-0786
0304-4092
DOI: 10.1007/bf02073180
Popis: Paul Radin occupies a rather special place in the history of anthropology. Until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century he identified himself with the Boas circle of cultural anthropology, but then he moved away from that school of thought and elabo? rated an independent program for the study of culture. This makes Radin an interesting figure because he recognized and attempted to solve in his own way one of the major con? temporary problems in anthropological and sociological theory. I am referring here to the combining of functional and historical ap? proaches to the analysis of the development of society and culture. In the works of Radin the posing of this problem is not immediately evident: it reveals itself in the more specific form of analysis of the anthropologist's pos? sibilities for "penetrating" the realm of an? other culture. For the anthropologist this task is always real, and the manner in which it is solved can have critical methodological and theoretical consequences. The cultural anthropologists of the Boas school regarded the analysis of categories of language as the basic means of "penetration." Their work in this field is widely known and acknowledged. Of comparable importance was their systematic way of drawing the Indians under ethnographic study into giving "firsthand" descriptions of their own cultures. Here methodology quite clearly defined on? tology: categories of thought were reduced to linguistic categories, and the structure and functions of culture repeated the main char? acteristics of language ? its signifying nature and its communicative role. The cultural anthropologists who did not consider language behavior sufficient for de? scribing all aspects of cultural phenomena undertook the study of non-verbal forms of behavior, thereby generating a particular cur? rent of psychological anthropology (R. Bene? dict and M. Mead, for example). However, in posing their task as the interpretation of cul? ture (conceived as an aggregate of the features of character and the forms of behavior of its bearers in their external actuality) through intuitive understanding, this current of D.B. Zilberman, a Soviet emigre anthropologist who has ap? peared before in Dialectical Anthropology, died recently in London. This is a revised version of an essay first published in the Soviet journal, Philosophy A broad. Susan Lay ton, translator and contributor to this journal, has been a Fulbright scholar in Slavic literature in Leningrad, and now teaches in the Slavic languages department of Columbia University.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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