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Adam Kuper

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Adam Kuper is a specialist on the ethnography of Southern Africa, and he has written widely on the history and theory of anthropology.
Selected Publications:
Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth Century, London: Routledge, 2015.
2009 Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
2005 The Reinvention of Primitive Society, London: Routledge. 2004 (Edited, with Jessica Kuper)
2004 The Social Science Encyclopedia, third edition, London: Routledge.
1999 ‘Culture': The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
1994 The Chosen Primate: Human Nature and Cultural Diversity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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University of Edinburgh

University of Aberdeen

Johns Hopkins University

Rodney Harrison

University College London

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

José Pimentel Teixeira

University of Basel

Liazzat J K Bonate

Chr. Michelsen Institute

Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

University of the Western Cape

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Papers by Adam Kuper

Social anthropology

Comment nommer les éléments? Les catégories anthropologiques en Afrique du Sud

Revue de synthèse, Jun 27, 2000

* Le titre original du manuscrit de cet article, « Today we have naming of parts », est tiré d'un... more

Anthropology and Anthropologists (Fourth edition)

Anthropology and anthropologists , 2014

This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle... more This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle decades of the 20th century. What really matters is to be found in what they left behind: the books and papers and intellectual arguments that testify to what they made of the world they lived in. Yet as anthropologists these particular natives knew very well that their academic work was shaped, among other things, by personal background, friendships and rivalries, career structures and institutions, and the politics of the times.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE SOTHO-SPEAKING PEOPLES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

Africa , 1975

Part II of a comparative study of traditional systems of kinship and marriage among the Sotho-spe... more

Kuper Sotho-speaking Peoples Part

Africa, 1975

Comparative study of traditional systems of kinship and marriage among the Sotho-speaking peoples... more

Alternative Histories of British Social Anthropology

Etnografica

Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School in the Twentieth Century

This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle... more This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle decades of the 20th century. What really matters is to be found in what they left behind: the books and papers and intellectual arguments that testify to what they made of the world they lived in. Yet as anthropologists these particular natives knew very well that their academic work was shaped, among other things, by personal background, friendships and rivalries, career structures and institutions, and the politics of the times.

Africa and the Anthropologist

Africa, 2001

... The tribute comes in the form of memoirs, poems and songs by Ahmed Al-Shahi, Gerd Baumann, Pa... more

Deconstructing anthropology: First Annual Stephen F. Gudeman Lecture

HAU Journal of Anthropological Theory, 2019

This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Class... more This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Classical theories invoked a certain kind of person as the subject of anthropology. He was the savage, the tribal, the indigenous. More recently he became simply The Other. Always, he was our mirror opposite, ourselves turned upside down in a fairground mirror. And the theories that tried to explain this imaginary actor recycled a recurrent set of ideas and arguments about nature and culture, and savagery and civilization. If we are to return to the real world we must free our thinking of these imaginary dichotomies, and set aside the repetitive cycle of mythical transformations that they support. Begin with the recognition that we are very like the people we study. Then construct a cosmopolitan anthropology that will confront current theories, models and methods with the experience and the understanding of the people we live with as ethnographers.

Deconstructing anthropology: First Annual Stephen F. Gudeman Lecture

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2019

This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Class... more This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Classical theories invoked a certain kind of person as the subject of anthropology. He was the savage, the tribal, the indigenous. More recently he became simply The Other. Always, he was our mirror opposite, ourselves turned upside down in a fairground mirror. And the theories that tried to explain this imaginary actor recycled a recurrent set of ideas and arguments about nature and culture, and savagery and civilization. If we are to return to the real world we must free our thinking of these imaginary dichotomies, and set aside the repetitive cycle of mythical transformations that they support. Begin with the recognition that we are very like the people we study. Then construct a cosmopolitan anthropology that will confront current theories, models and methods with the experience and the understanding of the people we live with as ethnographers.

The many meanings of culture

Engelsberg ideas, 2020

Among the buzzwords of our time, the intimately linked trio of 'culture', multiculturalism' and '... more

Margaret Mead: Putting things in boxes

London Review of Books, 2007

Margaret Mead's personal letters give an intimate account of her relationships with husbands and ... more

Putting things in boxes

Margaret Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, spent nearly two years in the interior of New ... more Margaret Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, spent nearly two years in the interior of New Guinea between 1931 and 1933. Just 29 years old when they set out, Mead had already published two bestselling books, Coming of Age in Samoa and Growing up in New Guinea. Fortune, a highly competitive, paranoid and occasionally violent New Zealander, had yet to make his name as an anthropologist. Conditions in the 0eld were rough, sometimes dangerous. They both had recurrent bouts of malaria. And they became thoroughly fed up with each other. They also found themselves at odds with the people they were studying. When Mead and Fortune 0rst penetrated the Sepik region it had only recently come under e/ective Australian control. Their bearers, coastal men, dumped their baggage as soon as they breasted the Prince Alexander mountains, leaving them stranded among an impoverished and scattered Arapesh-speaking population. They settled down to 0eldwork, but while Arapesh of both sexes were gentle and considerate, Fortune found the men unmanly and Mead thought them all rather boring. She became seriously depressed. In August 1932, they moved on, making what Mead described as a 'perfectly arbitrary decision' to follow a tributary of the Sepik and study the 0rst group they came across. They landed up among the Mundugumor, who had been paci0ed only three years before. The Mundugumor were much better o/ than the Arapesh, but they were aggressive, indeed ferocious, men and women alike-reputed to practise cannibalism and certainly given to infanticide. The men o1en le1 their wives if they got pregnant, accusing them of in0delity. The women were just as bloody-minded. 'Although women choose men as o1en as men choose women,' Mead wrote, 'the society is constructed so that men 0ght about women, and women elude, defy and complicate this 0ghting to the best of their abilities.' In particular, mothers set their sons against their fathers. They warned that the old men were prepared to sell their own daughters in order to get co-wives for themselves. Deprived of their sisters' bride-price, the sons would have no chance of marrying. Nobody cooperated with anyone else unless bullied into collective projects by people they themselves described as 'really bad men'. Fortune thought the Mundugumor behaviour natural if repellent; Mead was appalled by them and believed that they hated themselves, writing of 'the conviction of every Mundugumor that he is doing wrong and that he is being wronged by others'. The day before Christmas 1932, they le1 to take a holiday at the government station at Ambunti and to look for a new research base. On their way up the Sepik they stopped in Kankanamun, where an English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, was camped. Fortune and Bateson had been fellow students at Cambridge, working under Alfred Haddon, one of the pioneers of British anthropology, but Fortune, who saw himself as a colonial outsider, was wary of Bateson, the son of a famous Cambridge biologist. (Fortune told Mead that Haddon had been friendly enough towards him, but that he had given Bateson his mosquito net.

CA ✩ FORUM ON ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC The Return of the Native 1 by

On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations proclaimed an International Year of the World’s Indi... more On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations proclaimed an International Year of the World’s Indigenous People. A Decade for Indigenous Peoples was subsequently launched, to run from 1995 to 2004, and a Forum of Indigenous Peoples established. The inaugural meeting of the Forum, held in Geneva in 1996, was unfortunately disrupted by gate-crashers. A self-styled delegation of South African Boers turned up and demanded to be allowed to participate on the grounds that they too were indigenous people. Moreover, they claimed that their traditional culture was under threat from the new African National Congress government. They were unceremoniously ejected, and no doubt their motives were far from pure, but the drama might usefully have drawn attention to the difficulty of defining and identifying “indigenous people.” The loaded terms “native” and “indigenous” are the subject of much debate in activist circles. “Native” still has a colonial ring in many parts of the world, though it has b...

The concept of indigeneity

Social Anthropology, 2007

Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the 'indigenous peoples'... more Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the 'indigenous peoples' notion, by arguing a case for its validity, as a relational, legal concept-'a useful tool for political persuasion'-and a concept that is contingent historically and situationally, and not capable of being captured within one nomothetic definition. The author's 'third solution' along such lines is as cogent as it is practical and provides a way out of the definitional conundrum that engulfs the 'indigenous peoples' concept. It is also sensitive to the political problems, needs and aspirations of indigenous groups and the anthropologists who work among and for them. I appreciate Barnard's sensitivity on this score-his recognition that the indigenous peoples debate transcends the theoretical and ideological sensitivities of anthropologistscholars of the western academy. 'Indigenous' is a term applied to people-and by the people to themselves-who are engaged in an often desperate struggle for political rights, for land, for a place and space within a modern nation's economy and society. Identity and self-representation are vital elements of the political platform of such peoples. Politics, in the regions and the time the article is situated in-post-apartheid South and southern Africa-is all about identity, among various ethnic groups, with claims-after generations of oppression by the apartheid state-to rights, land and competing claims to 'first people' status and standing. Like Kuper and Suzman and others, I am disturbed-although not as much as they are, for reasons I will explain below-by the essentialism, primordialism and primitivism, as well as the residual colonialism, inherent in these conceptualisations of identity, which are so much out of step with where anthropology has got to in its post-modern, post-colonial period. Yet, as an anthropologist-one who has been in the southern African field for a fair bit of time, and throughout the politically turbulent 1990s-I also find myself in a dilemma on this issue. To 'the people'-in my case the San, or Bushmen, who over the past dozen years have become much stirred up politically, have organised themselves and are active on many fronts-'cultural identity' has become an extremely important matter. Self-representation is something people expend cultural and political energy on. 'Cau ba kg'õè dim dàò me e', explains Xguga Krisjan of the Kuru Development Trust's Cultural Centre in Ghanzi, Botswana. 'Culture is a way of life' that defines and differentiates the San people in their ethnically pluralist environment. It gives sense and direction to the people, for, as declared in a speech in November 1998 by KDT's indigenous spokesman Robert Morris, 'a nation without a culture is a lost nation' (the nation referred to being the ncoa khoe, the Ghanzi San's term of self-designation). The logo of the San organisation 'First Peoples of the Kalahari' is a fire surrounded by a circle of footprints, flanked by a digging stick on the left and hunting bow on the right-the most salient cultural symbols of these trance-dancing (erstwhile)

Book Review: Africa: Afrikaner and African Nationalism: South African Parallels and ParametersAfrikaner and African Nationalism: South African Parallels and Parameters. By MungerEdwin S.1967. (London: Toronto: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations. xviii, 142 pp. $3.75)

International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 1968

The Kgalagari and the Jural Consequences of Marriage

Man, 1970

THE KGALAGARI AND THE JURAL CONSEQUENCES OF MARRIAGE Adam Kuper Makerere University, Kampala Marr... more

Anthropology and Anthropologists

Routledge eBooks, Apr 8, 2014

Ensiklopedi ilmu-ilmu sosial, ed.2, vol.2 : 2 machiavelli-world system/ Kuper

hal. 593-1159.; 26 cm

Social anthropology

Comment nommer les éléments? Les catégories anthropologiques en Afrique du Sud

Revue de synthèse, Jun 27, 2000

* Le titre original du manuscrit de cet article, « Today we have naming of parts », est tiré d'un... more

Anthropology and Anthropologists (Fourth edition)

Anthropology and anthropologists , 2014

This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle... more This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle decades of the 20th century. What really matters is to be found in what they left behind: the books and papers and intellectual arguments that testify to what they made of the world they lived in. Yet as anthropologists these particular natives knew very well that their academic work was shaped, among other things, by personal background, friendships and rivalries, career structures and institutions, and the politics of the times.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE SOTHO-SPEAKING PEOPLES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

Africa , 1975

Part II of a comparative study of traditional systems of kinship and marriage among the Sotho-spe... more

Kuper Sotho-speaking Peoples Part

Africa, 1975

Comparative study of traditional systems of kinship and marriage among the Sotho-speaking peoples... more

Alternative Histories of British Social Anthropology

Etnografica

Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School in the Twentieth Century

This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle... more This is an ethnographic account of British social anthropologists in their golden age, the middle decades of the 20th century. What really matters is to be found in what they left behind: the books and papers and intellectual arguments that testify to what they made of the world they lived in. Yet as anthropologists these particular natives knew very well that their academic work was shaped, among other things, by personal background, friendships and rivalries, career structures and institutions, and the politics of the times.

Africa and the Anthropologist

Africa, 2001

... The tribute comes in the form of memoirs, poems and songs by Ahmed Al-Shahi, Gerd Baumann, Pa... more

Deconstructing anthropology: First Annual Stephen F. Gudeman Lecture

HAU Journal of Anthropological Theory, 2019

This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Class... more This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Classical theories invoked a certain kind of person as the subject of anthropology. He was the savage, the tribal, the indigenous. More recently he became simply The Other. Always, he was our mirror opposite, ourselves turned upside down in a fairground mirror. And the theories that tried to explain this imaginary actor recycled a recurrent set of ideas and arguments about nature and culture, and savagery and civilization. If we are to return to the real world we must free our thinking of these imaginary dichotomies, and set aside the repetitive cycle of mythical transformations that they support. Begin with the recognition that we are very like the people we study. Then construct a cosmopolitan anthropology that will confront current theories, models and methods with the experience and the understanding of the people we live with as ethnographers.

Deconstructing anthropology: First Annual Stephen F. Gudeman Lecture

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2019

This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Class... more This lecture makes a start at deconstructing some of anthropology's most venerable avatars. Classical theories invoked a certain kind of person as the subject of anthropology. He was the savage, the tribal, the indigenous. More recently he became simply The Other. Always, he was our mirror opposite, ourselves turned upside down in a fairground mirror. And the theories that tried to explain this imaginary actor recycled a recurrent set of ideas and arguments about nature and culture, and savagery and civilization. If we are to return to the real world we must free our thinking of these imaginary dichotomies, and set aside the repetitive cycle of mythical transformations that they support. Begin with the recognition that we are very like the people we study. Then construct a cosmopolitan anthropology that will confront current theories, models and methods with the experience and the understanding of the people we live with as ethnographers.

The many meanings of culture

Engelsberg ideas, 2020

Among the buzzwords of our time, the intimately linked trio of 'culture', multiculturalism' and '... more

Margaret Mead: Putting things in boxes

London Review of Books, 2007

Margaret Mead's personal letters give an intimate account of her relationships with husbands and ... more

Putting things in boxes

Margaret Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, spent nearly two years in the interior of New ... more Margaret Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, spent nearly two years in the interior of New Guinea between 1931 and 1933. Just 29 years old when they set out, Mead had already published two bestselling books, Coming of Age in Samoa and Growing up in New Guinea. Fortune, a highly competitive, paranoid and occasionally violent New Zealander, had yet to make his name as an anthropologist. Conditions in the 0eld were rough, sometimes dangerous. They both had recurrent bouts of malaria. And they became thoroughly fed up with each other. They also found themselves at odds with the people they were studying. When Mead and Fortune 0rst penetrated the Sepik region it had only recently come under e/ective Australian control. Their bearers, coastal men, dumped their baggage as soon as they breasted the Prince Alexander mountains, leaving them stranded among an impoverished and scattered Arapesh-speaking population. They settled down to 0eldwork, but while Arapesh of both sexes were gentle and considerate, Fortune found the men unmanly and Mead thought them all rather boring. She became seriously depressed. In August 1932, they moved on, making what Mead described as a 'perfectly arbitrary decision' to follow a tributary of the Sepik and study the 0rst group they came across. They landed up among the Mundugumor, who had been paci0ed only three years before. The Mundugumor were much better o/ than the Arapesh, but they were aggressive, indeed ferocious, men and women alike-reputed to practise cannibalism and certainly given to infanticide. The men o1en le1 their wives if they got pregnant, accusing them of in0delity. The women were just as bloody-minded. 'Although women choose men as o1en as men choose women,' Mead wrote, 'the society is constructed so that men 0ght about women, and women elude, defy and complicate this 0ghting to the best of their abilities.' In particular, mothers set their sons against their fathers. They warned that the old men were prepared to sell their own daughters in order to get co-wives for themselves. Deprived of their sisters' bride-price, the sons would have no chance of marrying. Nobody cooperated with anyone else unless bullied into collective projects by people they themselves described as 'really bad men'. Fortune thought the Mundugumor behaviour natural if repellent; Mead was appalled by them and believed that they hated themselves, writing of 'the conviction of every Mundugumor that he is doing wrong and that he is being wronged by others'. The day before Christmas 1932, they le1 to take a holiday at the government station at Ambunti and to look for a new research base. On their way up the Sepik they stopped in Kankanamun, where an English anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, was camped. Fortune and Bateson had been fellow students at Cambridge, working under Alfred Haddon, one of the pioneers of British anthropology, but Fortune, who saw himself as a colonial outsider, was wary of Bateson, the son of a famous Cambridge biologist. (Fortune told Mead that Haddon had been friendly enough towards him, but that he had given Bateson his mosquito net.

CA ✩ FORUM ON ANTHROPOLOGY IN PUBLIC The Return of the Native 1 by

On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations proclaimed an International Year of the World’s Indi... more On Human Rights Day 1992, the United Nations proclaimed an International Year of the World’s Indigenous People. A Decade for Indigenous Peoples was subsequently launched, to run from 1995 to 2004, and a Forum of Indigenous Peoples established. The inaugural meeting of the Forum, held in Geneva in 1996, was unfortunately disrupted by gate-crashers. A self-styled delegation of South African Boers turned up and demanded to be allowed to participate on the grounds that they too were indigenous people. Moreover, they claimed that their traditional culture was under threat from the new African National Congress government. They were unceremoniously ejected, and no doubt their motives were far from pure, but the drama might usefully have drawn attention to the difficulty of defining and identifying “indigenous people.” The loaded terms “native” and “indigenous” are the subject of much debate in activist circles. “Native” still has a colonial ring in many parts of the world, though it has b...

The concept of indigeneity

Social Anthropology, 2007

Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the 'indigenous peoples'... more Alan Barnard presents a well considered critique of Kuper's rejection of the 'indigenous peoples' notion, by arguing a case for its validity, as a relational, legal concept-'a useful tool for political persuasion'-and a concept that is contingent historically and situationally, and not capable of being captured within one nomothetic definition. The author's 'third solution' along such lines is as cogent as it is practical and provides a way out of the definitional conundrum that engulfs the 'indigenous peoples' concept. It is also sensitive to the political problems, needs and aspirations of indigenous groups and the anthropologists who work among and for them. I appreciate Barnard's sensitivity on this score-his recognition that the indigenous peoples debate transcends the theoretical and ideological sensitivities of anthropologistscholars of the western academy. 'Indigenous' is a term applied to people-and by the people to themselves-who are engaged in an often desperate struggle for political rights, for land, for a place and space within a modern nation's economy and society. Identity and self-representation are vital elements of the political platform of such peoples. Politics, in the regions and the time the article is situated in-post-apartheid South and southern Africa-is all about identity, among various ethnic groups, with claims-after generations of oppression by the apartheid state-to rights, land and competing claims to 'first people' status and standing. Like Kuper and Suzman and others, I am disturbed-although not as much as they are, for reasons I will explain below-by the essentialism, primordialism and primitivism, as well as the residual colonialism, inherent in these conceptualisations of identity, which are so much out of step with where anthropology has got to in its post-modern, post-colonial period. Yet, as an anthropologist-one who has been in the southern African field for a fair bit of time, and throughout the politically turbulent 1990s-I also find myself in a dilemma on this issue. To 'the people'-in my case the San, or Bushmen, who over the past dozen years have become much stirred up politically, have organised themselves and are active on many fronts-'cultural identity' has become an extremely important matter. Self-representation is something people expend cultural and political energy on. 'Cau ba kg'õè dim dàò me e', explains Xguga Krisjan of the Kuru Development Trust's Cultural Centre in Ghanzi, Botswana. 'Culture is a way of life' that defines and differentiates the San people in their ethnically pluralist environment. It gives sense and direction to the people, for, as declared in a speech in November 1998 by KDT's indigenous spokesman Robert Morris, 'a nation without a culture is a lost nation' (the nation referred to being the ncoa khoe, the Ghanzi San's term of self-designation). The logo of the San organisation 'First Peoples of the Kalahari' is a fire surrounded by a circle of footprints, flanked by a digging stick on the left and hunting bow on the right-the most salient cultural symbols of these trance-dancing (erstwhile)

Book Review: Africa: Afrikaner and African Nationalism: South African Parallels and ParametersAfrikaner and African Nationalism: South African Parallels and Parameters. By MungerEdwin S.1967. (London: Toronto: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations. xviii, 142 pp. $3.75)

International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis, 1968

The Kgalagari and the Jural Consequences of Marriage

Man, 1970

THE KGALAGARI AND THE JURAL CONSEQUENCES OF MARRIAGE Adam Kuper Makerere University, Kampala Marr... more

Anthropology and Anthropologists

Routledge eBooks, Apr 8, 2014

Ensiklopedi ilmu-ilmu sosial, ed.2, vol.2 : 2 machiavelli-world system/ Kuper

hal. 593-1159.; 26 cm

Zones of contact: Art and ethnography in midcentury France

Times Literary Supplement, 2019

Ethnology, art, empire and politics in French museums in the twentieth century.

Colônias Metrópolis, um antropólogo e a sua antropologia - Entrevista com Adam Kuper (2000)

by Federico Neiburg, Adam Kuper, and Carlos Fausto

Adam Kuper é mais conhecido no Brasil por seus trabalhos sobre a antropologia britânica, de claro... more Adam Kuper é mais conhecido no Brasil por seus trabalhos sobre a antropologia britânica, de claro recorte histórico e de tom, ao mesmo tempo, crítico e irônico. Seu livro Antropólogos e Antropologias, traduzido para o português pouco após ser publicado, tornou-se um clássico em nossos cursos de graduação, assim como vem ocorrendo com The Invention of Primitive Society nos cursos de pós-graduação. Menos conhecida é sua produção propriamente etnográfica, baseada em pesquisas de campo na África e na Jamaica. Muitos ignoram, ademais, que Adam Kuper não é e não se vê exatamente como um antropólogo britânico. Ele nasceu na África do Sul e lá foi criado no período de consolidação do regime segregacionista. Nesta entrevista, exploramos as conexões entre a história social e política daquele país e o desenvolvimento intelectual da antropologia, a partir da perspectiva de um de seus filhos e autores.

Wives for cattle

Wives for Cattle provides a regional comparison of the social and cultural forms taken by systems... more

Kalahari Village Politics: An African Democracy

Cambridge University Press, 1970

A study of local politics among the BaKgalagari of the Kalahari desert in the years immediately b... more