A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain

Abstract

and to disclose their meaning for the political and economic dimensions of social organiz ation . Over this same period the discipline has grappled with a wide range of theoretical and methodological problems. Political changes have redrawn boundaries be­ tween many of its traditional culture areas and the populations within them, while international economic interdepend encies have raised questions about the appropriate scale for analytic uni ts. Many investigators began to recognize that the typological boundaries they had drawn around populatio ns, and the types of social organization so outl ined obscured as much as they revealed about social processes within and between these popUlati ons. As schol ars debated the analytic merit of the boundar ies they had established between such conceptual domains as kinship , politi cs, econom ics, and religion, the discipline was fragmenting into numerous topical subdisciplines, such as economic anthr opology, political anthrop ology, and symbolic anthr opol­ ogy--each struggling to define its units, scale, and context of analysis , and the implications of different topical analyses for the overall objectives of the discipline.