Tamara Sellers

Bloomsburg University

THE “USE AND DISUSE” OF

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

Deconstruct canons and note diachronic trends and changes within and between them.

Note trends of Anthropological thinkers and their overall relevancy to the discipline over time.

Understand the “use and disuse” of thinkers and their ideas.

Compare our theory textbook canon of anthropological thinkers to their presence in AnthroSource.

RESEARCH GOALS

Access AnthroSourceUse theorists from theory textbook as search terms.Keyword Search: Theorists’ last names.Collect data on how often:

Theorists are cited Their works are published Articles are relevant to the thinker or use their ideas.

Create Excel tables and graphs to illustrate findings.Create word clouds to show diachronic changes.

Research does not include ALL theorists, only those referenced in the textbook Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History.

Data includes the first 25 of 41 thinkers within the textbook.

METHODOLOGY

DIGGING THROUGH DATABASES

DIGGING DEEPER

KEYWORD SEARCH: RAW DATA

KEYWORDS FROM ANTHROSOURCE JOURNALS 1880-2013

*Word Cloud made with www.wordle.net

KEYWORD FREQUENCY (1880-2013)

KEYWORD FREQUENCY (2000-2013)

*Word Cloud made with www.wordle.net

Top Referenced Theorists (1880-2013) A. L. Kroeber: 211 Articles Margaret Mead: 160 Franz Boas: 121 Eric Wolf: 72 Leslie White: 71

Top Referenced Theorists (2000-2013) Franz Boas: 22 Articles Margaret Mead: 15 Eric Wolf: 10 Sherry B. Ortner: 10 Karl Marx: 7 Marcel Mauss: 7

RESEARCH RESULTS

*Images used with permission by F. Warner

Above: Keyword Frequency (1880-2013)

Right: Keyword Frequency (2000-2013)

*Word Clouds made with www.wordle.net

DISCUSSION Only Margaret Mead & Franz Boas continue to be as cited

today as often as in the past. Father and Mother of the discipline—popular figures

Levi-Strauss has a weak place in the AnthroSource canon.

Eric Wolf, Sherry Ortner, Marcel Mauss, Marx, Malinowski, and Weber occur most often after Mead and Boas 2000-2013.

Does our canon text book correspond to the canon AnthroSource?

KROEBER OCCURS OFTEN EARLIER IN THE CANON (MID-CENTURY) , BUT THEN NEARLY DISAPPEARS FROM THE CANON BY

1970.“DEAN OF AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY”