In the United States a “culture-and-personality” school developed that drew rather on new movements in psychology (particularly psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology). Later developments in the social sciences resulted in the emergence of a positivist cross-cultural project, associated with George P. Murdock at Yale University, which applied statistical methods to a sample of world cultures and attempted to establish universal functionalist relationships between forms of marriage, descent systems, property relationships, and other variables. Under the influence of the American social theorist Talcott Parsons, the anthropologists at Harvard University were drawn into team projects with sociologists and psychologists. They came to be regarded as the specialists in the study of “culture” within the framework of an interdisciplinary social science.
In the 1950s and ’60s, evolutionist ideas gained fresh currency in American anthropology, where they were cast as a challenge to the relativism and historical particularism of the Boasians. Some of the new evolutionists (led by Leslie White) reclaimed the abandoned territory of Victorian social theory, arguing for a coherent world history of human development, through a succession of stages, from a common primitive base. The more developed a society, the more complex its organization and the more energy it consumed. White believed that energy consumption was the gauge of cultural advance. Another tendency, led by Julian Steward, argued rather for an evolutionism that was more directly Darwinian in inspiration. Cultural practices were to be treated as modes of adaptation to specific environmental challenges. More skeptical than White about traditional models of unilineal evolution, Steward urged the study of particular evolutionary processes within enduring culture areas, in which societies with a common origin were exposed to similar ecological constraints. Students of White and Steward, including Marshall Sahlins, revived classic evolutionist questions about the origins of the state and the consequences of technological progress.
The institutional development of anthropology in Europe was strongly influenced by the existence of overseas empires, and in the aftermath of World War II anthropologists were drawn into development programs in the so-called Third World. In the United States, anthropologists had traditionally studied the native peoples of North and Central America. During World War II, however, they were called upon to apply their expertise to assist the war effort, along with other social scientists. As the United States became increasingly influential in the world, in the aftermath of the war, the profession grew explosively. In the 1950s and ’60s, important field studies were carried out by American ethnographers working in Indonesia, in East and West Africa, and in the many societies in the South Seas that had been brought under direct or indirect American control as a result of the war in the Pacific.
In the view of some critics, social and cultural anthropology was becoming, in effect, a Western social science that specialized in the study of colonial and postcolonial societies. The war in Vietnam fueled criticism of American engagement in the Third World and precipitated a radical shift in American anthropology. There was general disenchantment with the project of “modernizing” the new states that had emerged after World War II, and many American anthropologists began to turn away from the social sciences.
American anthropology divided between two intellectual tendencies. One school, inspired by modern developments in genetics, looked for biological determinants of human cultures and sought to revive the traditional alliance between cultural anthropology and biological anthropology. Another school insisted that cultural anthropology should aim to interpret other cultures rather than to seek laws of cultural development or cultural integration and that it should therefore situate itself within the humanities rather than in the biological sciences or the social sciences.
Clifford Geertz was the most influential proponent of an “interpretive” anthropology. This represented a movement away from biological frameworks of explanation and a rejection of sociological or psychological preoccupations. The ethnographer was to focus on symbolic communications, and so rituals and other cultural performances became the main focus of research. Sociological and psychological explanations were left to other disciplines. In the next generation, a radically relativist version of Geertz’s program became influential. It was argued that cultural consensus is rare and that interpretations are therefore always partial. Cultural boundaries are provisional and uncertain, identities fragile and fabricated. Consequently ethnographers should represent a variety of discordant voices, not try to identify a supposedly normative cultural view. In short, it was an illusion that objective ethnographic studies could be produced and reliable comparisons undertaken.