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Anthropological Panacea or Epistemological Straitjacket

It is a pleasure to respond to Josep Llobera’s article. The paper is indeed provocative and it raises issues that merit discussion and debate. Unfortunately, I also found it frustrating on several counts. To begin with, it is not clear to me whether ’Anglo-Saxon anthropology’ refers to anthropology written in English, the anthropology of an Anglo-American intellectual hegemony (a matter certainly worthy of discussion), or perhaps something else. Since the two anthropologists identified by name in the article are Malinowski and Levi-Strauss, the meaning is even more elusive. This is a relatively small frustration. Harder to deal with is the fact that the author tends to present his position in such sweeping terms that it is difficult for a discussant to debate the anthropological contributions of given scholars, or even say much respecting research trends in the course of the last twenty or thirty years. Llobera, quite correctly in my opinion, takes note of the tremendous heterogeneity to be found in Southwestern Europe. I would suggest that there is also substantial diversity in the models and approaches used by anthropologists working in the area. It is true that much early work, such as Pitt-Rivers’ (1954) The People of the Sierra, describes village society as if it were essentially ahistorical, untouched by the great political and economic transformations of our times. But this is only part of the picture. All manner of critical social processes may be studied from a rural perspective, something that has been done by several authors, including Davis (1973), Blok (1974), Schneider and Schneider (1976), and more recently by Silverman (1984) in her aptly titled article, ’Towards an Anthropology of Urbanism: The View from the Village’. My