Olof LjungströmSons of Their Fathers. Genealogical Thinking and the Construction of Disciplinary Tradition in Modern Anthropology."One generation’s conscious omission is the next generation’s genuine amnesia." The history of socio-cultural anthropology has traditionally acknowledged a specific set of "founding fathers" and "precursors". Modern socio-cultural anthropology is internationally fairly cohesive, deriving its disciplinary tradition almost exclusively from British "social anthropology" or American "cultural anthropology". This tradition has since the 1960s been under revision by British and American historians of science, amply demonstrating its mythical qualities as history-writing, and its relative "uselessness" for the further writing of intellectual history. At the same time, this "mythical" history, giving the community of anthropologists a sense of identity, is still often invoked outside of the Anglo-Saxon world, to structure accounts of the history of continental anthropology, particularly in the 19th century. Questions about the construction of disciplinary genealogies have been raised within my work on the 19th century anthropology in Sweden. I have found a predominately German late 19th century anthropological "Stand der Forschung" that was engaged in the construction of a disciplinary genealogy according to patterns identical to those embraced by modern anthropology, but with a different distribution of parts to play by the same cast of characters as well as a number of virtually forgotten participants. Any disciplinary tradition represents an "imagined community", fixated only through constant repetition and reification. From the point of view of the writing of disciplinary history, this has been taken into account. The task is not to "get it right" by identifying the "correct" genealogy. Such endeavours are traditionally permeated by a specific pattern of genealogical thinking, i.e. the tendency to identify founding fathers, and treat their "descendants" as determined by their ancestry. Drawing upon the anthropological study of kinship-systems, I will propose a different model as an conceptual tool for the writing of disciplinary history, which I find more functional in describing how disciplinary/intellectual genealogies are constructed and maintained. Olof Ljungström
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