In 1874, a group of Frenchmen in revolt against the academic rules of their profession was dubbed “Impressionist”; this attempt at destruction by ridicule failed when the painters turned the intended insult into an honored label. The inflated value put upon their work since has not diminished the honor of the title. Another type of blowing up has had the opposite effect: Anarchism, whose modern emergence was contemporary with Impressionism, has pejorative connotations today. Too often, it is used as a synonym for “anarchy,” and we have been encouraged to think of it as merely a revolutionary creed like communism with, if anything, more nihilistic and destructive overtones. In the empty dialogue of political denunciation, the epithet “anarchist” has become the countercharge to the accusation “fascist,” without the protagonists having much idea what either term means. The height of absurdity was reached when long-suffering Polish workmen were described as “anarchists” by their socialist masters after the economic crisis of Christmas 1970.

In the short history of anthropology as an academic discipline, polemics tinged with personal recrimination have been a constant feature. One might even be led to suspect that controversy has become a firm technique, in line with conflict theory, so that in the middle ground between opposing interpretations of social behaviour may be found a more acceptable aspect of the truth. ‘Penetrating analyses’, so the aphorism might run, ‘are tempered in the fire of animosity.’ Some protagonists had a positive genius for attracting thinly-veiled contumely and for polarizing opinion, even after they had ceased to be practising anthropologists. Perhaps the best example of this was Radcliffe-Brown, as a perusal of the journals Oceania in 1955 and the American Anthropologist from 1951 to 1956 will readily disclose. This method of advancing knowledge, if we may call it such, did not die with Radcliffe-Brown; it has been used many times since—and the discipline is the richer, one hastens to add.