In dinosaurs' footsteps

Although information technology is supposed to sound the death-knell of big dictionaries and encyclpedias, curiously, publishers have not yet heard the news. The fact is that IT makes it a great deal easier to herd, cull and flense the multiple authorship involved in such an enterprise. There will be more.

The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology runs to four volumes, from A to W. Farewell, then, Xenophobia and Zoomorphism. The entries are short, mostly three or four sides, some running to five or six. For such a heavy work they feel a little light, perhaps, as the introduction suggests, because it is aimed as much at the high school as the university market. The attempt to make each entry self-contained leads to much repetition but this is a problem only when engaging in the reviewer's unnatural pursuit of reading straight through. Some of the entries are a little quirky. Why an entry on the Royal Anthropological Institute? Why a whole section on textiles as if they raised special primordial problems? A peek at the list of editors and their particular interests explains all.

What does one want from an entry in a book of this kind? A definition of the range of a term, a swift history of the concept, an outline of its relevance to anthropology, current concerns and debates, above all a few well-pointed references. Mostly, this is exactly what you get, a sort of slightly higher-brow Bluff your Way in Anthropology.

Often, the best writers turn out to be not just contributors but guest editors. The trick seems to be to retain a certain cutting edge, rather than give way to sheer blandness, for too many of the entries end in irritating upbeat little cliches, perhaps left over from requests for funding, about "ongoing active research" and "opening up exciting and important issues".

The bulk of the work, it must be said, could have been written 20 years ago. In itself, this is fair enough - anthropology has never been rich in new ideas - though it tends to undermine the publisher's breathy argument that "theories are constantly being revised and discoveries made".

The volumes swarm with curiously American formations, behavioural ecology, cultural ecology, historical ecology, evolutionary ecology, cultural evolution, cultural materialism, interpretive anthropology. North American theoretical dinosaurs trumpet and stamp pettishly offstage as we tirelessly circle the same unresolved issues in entry after entry - individual/collective, nature/nurture, function/meaning, emic/etic.

Facing these pillars of American academe across an unbridgeable epistemological gap are the "posts" - postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism - which seek to replace the soft gums of humanist relativism with the sharp little teeth of self-righteous political resentment. In individual entries the shiny newer stuff has been simply bolted on to the well-patinated rest. This too is a fair enough reflection of the state of anthropology. Different approaches have little to say to each other and holism works no better within the discipline than it did as a method of study outside it.

Many of the entries seem to assume a world designed by Oprah Winfrey. We have breastfeeding, assimilation, child abuse, homelessness, spousal violence. Anyone wanting that grand old classic, circumcision, will find it firmly filed under genital mutilation. Cultural anthropology is clearly depicted as an adjunct of international social work (no entry) and to be justified by its good works.

Another swatch of entries reflects the genealogy of the encyclopedia as produced "under the auspices" of the Human Relations Area Files and this is one of the real problems with the work as a reference publication. The HRAF, as its entry here tells us, controls a huge database of comparative material on the world's cultures, compiled over some 50 years.

What it does not tell us is that many anthropologists find its analytic categories so crude and culture-bound that it is virtually unusable for any serious purpose. It dates back to a time when many believed that crosscultural comparison would show firm correlations between culture traits, so that pastoralism would tie up with frequent divorce, patrilineality with drum-playing, whatever. Nowadays, most such correlations and statistical generalisations are seen as either tautologous or simply uninteresting - of the "blue-eyed Frenchmen live longer" type - and the HRAF's greatest value lies in constituting a fund of information that demolishes such easy links.

Yet the show must go on. So we learn under adornment that in 25 per cent of preindustrial societies women remove their pubic hair while men do so in 17 per cent, 32 per cent of males are tattooed and 45 per cent of females, while 17 per cent of both sexes file or knock out their teeth. Under sexual division of labour, we have a full-page grand table of HRAF-derived information proudly showing sex allocation of 50 technological activities in 185 societies, together with musings about subcorrelations. In 74 per cent of societies, pottery-making is exclusively female.

Fine. But now it is time for me to grind my own axes. For even such a simple matter as potting in Africa it is impossible to begin to see the sexual division of labour until we discard sex for gender and realise that it is not pottery that is subject to regulation but the making of images. Very often, it is the menopause that turns an African woman from a mere pot-maker to a maker of images in clay, whether these are in the form of pots or not. Under the simple heading of pots, we are really talking about gender, models of gestation and creativity that cannot be encompassed by a tick in the appropriate column. Crosscultural statistics of this naive kind simply bury the real issues and make them irrecoverable.

This is a work to be used cautiously. At the moment, it is the best there is.

Nigel Barley is assistant keeper, Museum of Mankind, London.