Comparison of Marilyn Strathern’s “synthesis” of social anthropology and cultural studies versus my own

One of the big issues which dominated British social anthropology in the 1990s was its relationship to cultural studies. Here are some standard stories of origins: cultural studies developed from applying predominantly French 1960s theoretical frameworks, developed for the study of prestigious arts, to less esteemed culture, on the grounds that they can be used there too or that there is no defensible distinction between the two. Social anthropology, older, had started out in the 19th century as the study of human societies, with a special emphasis on primitive societies, and developed a special method of lengthy intensive fieldwork and later applied this method “at home” too. Its traditional reference points are different and unsurprisingly there is rivalry, sometimes bitter. I interpret Marilyn Strathern as trying to offer an anthropology to win over students for whom cultural studies has appeal, in her 1992 book After Nature: English kinship in the late 20th century. She engages in a kind of worldview analysis of a number of things of interest to students of English culture - she grasps the intellectual tastes of the student and aims at an anthropology which works for that taste, it seems to me. My own synthesis is at a philosophical level. Building on John Searle’’s responses to Jacques Derrida, I observe positivist premises shared by this influential figure in cultural studies and the functionalist tradition which dominated British anthropology from the 1920s to the 1960s at least. These allow us to conceive a more Derridean functionalist anthropology. Also I propose that it is possible to do a number of functionalist analyses for “1990s cultural studies tastes,” as Strathern does worldview analyses.