Primitive Mentality, Modern Civilization and the Fate of Anthropology - A Conversation with Professor Christopher Hallpike

Oct 15, 2026

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A reflective academic conversation explores how the discipline of anthropology emerged and why studying “how we got from there to here” matters for understanding human nature. It traces influences from Sir Edward Burnett Tylor and the Annales school to fieldwork among non-literate societies in East Africa. The discussion connects social history, cultural evolution, and neo-Darwinian approaches, while questioning how modernity reshapes interpretation of the past.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages9

Reading Time14 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Early influences and the discipline of anthropology

Explaining the shift from past to modernity

Fieldwork and encounters with non-literate societies

Cultural evolution and neo-Darwinism

Acad. Quest . (2021) 34.4 DOI 10. 51845/34 .4.12 Primitive Mentality, Modern Civilization and the Fate of Anthropology: A Conversation with Professor Christopher Hallpike Geoffrey Clarfield I discovered anthropology as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate in 1972. By that time, I had read a fair amount of academic history, which focused on leaders, politics, economics, and to some degree the movement of groups, such as the barbarian tribes who destroyed the Western Roman Empire or the dispersion of the Jews, my very own ancestors, after our conquest by the Romans. I began to read about a field of study defined by the founder of anthropology, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, a nineteenth century English scholar who had christened this new initiative the “science of daily life” and then found myself reading ethnographies, mostly of non-industrial or pre-industrial peoples. Soon after, I discovered the French historical school called the “Annales,”who in their own way had embraced Tylor’s dictum and who had begun to write Western history “from the ground up.” I therefore read Braudel’s magisterial works on the Mediterranean, his three books on capitalism and daily life in Europe and at the same time slowly read others in his school, such as his teacher Bloch’s classic two volume study of medieval society, while exploring anthropological works about contemporary tribal peoples. What made anthropologists and social historians partners in a common intellectual project was their desire to explain “how we got from there to here,”that is to say how we as a species went from pre-historic hunter gatherers to members of advanced industrial states in little over 12,000 years, and whether contemporary non-literate societies are in some ways a “window to the past” as to how we all once lived, felt, and thought. Geoffrey Clarfield is a musician and anthropologist who spent seventeen years travelling, living and working in East Africa; [geoffrey.anthropologistatlarge@gmail.com. He was Director of Ethnography and](geoffrey.anthropologistatlarge@gmail.com. He was Director of Ethnography and)[ ](geoffrey.anthropologistatlarge@gmail.com. He was Director of Ethnography and)Special projects at the National Museums of Kenya, after which he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Nairobi. Clarfield was the executive producer and narrator for the documentary film about central Tanzania “Facing Mount Hanang” and recorded with the late Tanzanian singer songwriter Ndala Kasheba. He has also written numerous articles about Africa for a variety of newspapers and magazines . A second and related question was,“How did we become modern and what of it?” That is to say, how did we break with the lifestyle and worldview of our medieval forebears and enter the modern world of science with its uniquely Western desire to understand our own society and culture and those of others. While so many scholars and thinkers felt that the study of the remnant societies of the “underdeveloped world” was a side show of a side show, it was not. That is because in order to understand who we are we have to gain a better understanding of where we come from: ancient and prehistoric societies similar to those still tribal and marginal societies that survive in the “developing world.” Until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries academic historians did not seriously engage in these kinds of enquiries. If we could answer the question of how we got here from there we would also hope that anthropologists could come up with a definition of human nature, or at least a taxonomy of social and cultural differences that could be ranked over time and space based on the multiplicity of field reports. A theory of cultural evolution could and should emerge from this kind of inquiry. Although some anthropologists have taken up this challenge it has become complicated by anthropologists and “cultural ecologists,” scholars who have applied Darwinian theory to the rise of society, from hu

FAQs

What motivated the speaker to discover anthropology?

The speaker encountered anthropology as an undergraduate and began reading foundational work by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, then moved into ethnographies of non-industrial and pre-industrial peoples.

How does the conversation frame the purpose of anthropology?

Anthropology is presented as a way to explain “how we got from there to here,” connecting early social forms to modern industrial states and considering non-literate societies as windows into the past.

What kind of work did the speaker do as an anthropologist?

The speaker committed to close to two years of anthropological fieldwork, studying daily life among a Cushitic-speaking group of camel nomads and receiving exposure through extended visits to a Rendille community.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by Aditya