Paper short abstract:

Over the last half century the writer has engaged in four branches of anthropology. The different styles of imagination involved are here explored, and it is argued that an anthropological education can and should continue to allow for such variety.

Paper long abstract:

This case study of one anthropologist (myself) is intended less to advertise a bibliography than to consider how different sub-disciplines have interacted in a single career. How far do they express a single style of curiosity, such as can be expected of a unitary discipline?

My original orientation was Himalayan ethnography. Apart from ordinary tribal ethnography, the aim was to imagine the Thulung Rai less in themselves than as representing non-literary Tibeto-Burman speakers ‒ much time was devoted to the language. Via kinship terminologies, this led on to kinship studies. My imagination focused on the logically simplest type of human kinship system, an issue potentially useful for biological anthropology. A third interest was in disciplinary history -- in Durkheim and, above all, Mauss. I tried to imagine Mauss's mental world, and to take further some of his theoretical insights. Finally, this led on to Indo-European Cultural Comparison and the attempt to imagine the early Indo-European myths and epics from which Homer and the Sanskrit Mahābhārata derive. Such work, necessarily interdisciplinary, takes its comparative dimension from anthropology as well as from philology, and its approach is surely applicable to other language families.

I am not claiming that this particular career is somehow exemplary ‒ rather that the different sub-disciplines can interact fruitfully, and that future generations should not be denied the encouragement and opportunity to move around within the framework of a unitary discipline. Personally I have gained particular inspiration from the world-historical conceptions of Mauss.