lost sight of the kinds of comparisons and generalization that the earlier
armchair anthropologists had sought. If this was so, it would partly have
been because the whole world view of such systems had changed away
from an evolutionary perspective. The societies anthropologists studied
were still quietly pigeonholed as simple or undeveloped but without much
emphasis on this– understandably perhaps because the ethnography
revealed how complex they were.
Drawing on earlier work that was actually rooted in evolutionary the-
ory, anthropologists following in Radcliffe-Brown’s footsteps looked to
models of different systems of kinship, descent, and marriage as a locus of
comparison and generalization.
While these exercises in turn drew criticisms, they certainly were efforts
to build comparisons out of particular ethnographies. To operate, they
had, however, to identify separate entities to be compared. As a heuristic
device this was justifiable. However, when one realizes that the entities
compared are notfixed butfluid, it becomes apparent that a different
approach is needed. Processual theory provided one means of doing this.
The frame of separate‘societies’became questionable, and the tide in
study offlows and change came strongly in.
Such a process of change reminds us of how theory in anthropology
often emerges from events in the world at large, as anthropologists adjust
to the actual conditions and exigencies offieldwork in new circumstances.
This experience brings with it in turn a different perspective on past studies,
based on some other paradigmatic assumptions. It is change that stimulates
new creativity and questions about earlier analyses. As we have already
argued, all this is very complex and does not necessarily amount to a
story of simple incremental progress, but rather to an understanding of
the dialectical relationship between anthropological theories and the world
that they relate to. Such a consideration in turn leads to a realization that
theories aiming to explain events are themselves a part of such events. The
outcome is to cast some doubt on totalizing systems of explanation, while
in no way abandoning the project of theory construction. Highly closed
and deterministic applications of theory, however, are less likely to survive
over time than open-ended and provisional ones. We introduce here the
idea of‘Mindful Anthropology’as a way of proceeding thoughtfully
through theory construction and deconstruction in such circumstances.
‘Be mindful’is an injunction that counsels us to be open to the world of
experience, and tofind our way through it by noting and remembering the
fine lace of connections among the phenomena we study. A mindful
2 CHANGE 19